Cosmetic — 6 min read
Smile Makeover
Not a procedure — a design brief. The question is never which treatment, but which combination, in which order, to reach a face-driven result.
Screened and introduced free, usually within a few hours. Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and the surrounding corridor.
Indications
A makeover is the right frame when
A smile makeover is a coordinated plan that may combine whitening, gum recontouring, orthodontics, bonding, veneers and crowns. What makes it a makeover rather than a list of procedures is that the endpoint is designed first, and every step is chosen to reach it.
- You dislike your smile but cannot identify the single thing causing it
- Colour, shape, alignment and gum line all need attention
- Previous cosmetic work looks mismatched against your natural teeth
- Your smile line is uneven, or one side sits visibly higher than the other
- Teeth have worn short and the smile has lost its youthful proportion
- You have a specific date — a wedding, a role, a milestone — and need a sequenced plan
Good candidate if
- You want the endpoint designed before treatment starts
- You are open to orthodontics first if it means less tooth removed
- Gum health and decay are addressed as part of the plan
- You want to approve the result in your own mouth beforehand
No cost, no obligation, no lead list.
The detail
Designed from the face inward
Not a procedure — a design brief. The question is never which treatment, but which combination, in which order, to reach a face-driven result.
Good design starts outside the mouth. The midline of the smile should relate to the face, not to the teeth. The curve of the upper edges should follow the lower lip. Tooth width follows recognised proportions, and the amount of upper tooth visible at rest is a real measurement — a few millimetres in the young, less with age, and reversing that is much of what makes a makeover read as rejuvenation rather than dentistry.
Digital Smile Design turns this into something you can evaluate rather than trust. Photographs and video of you speaking and laughing are overlaid with the proposed design, and that proposal is 3D-printed and placed in your mouth as a trial smile. You look at it, speak with it, photograph it, and change it. Every subsequent step — including how much enamel is removed — is derived from the design you approved, rather than improvised at the chair.
The sequence
What actually happens, in order.
Timings vary between practices and cases. The order does not — and a plan that skips a step is worth asking about.
Consultation and records
Facial and dental photography, video of speech and smile, digital scans, and a discussion of what you actually want changed.
Digital design
The proposed smile is designed over your own photographs and reviewed with you before anything physical is made.
Trial smile
The design is printed and placed over your teeth. You live with it, gather opinions, and request changes.
Foundation work
Whitening, gum recontouring, orthodontics or restorative repair as the plan requires — sequenced so nothing is later undone.
Definitive restorations
Ceramics made to copy the approved design, bonded, then reviewed with a protective guard if indicated.
Getting the right hands
Who should be doing your smile makeover.
This is the variable that decides your result, and it is the one you have least ability to assess from the outside.
Not years in dentistry. How many of these they do in a month, and what the difficult ones looked like.
Anyone can photograph a result on delivery day. We want to see it after it has been used.
CBCT, microscope, scanner, printer — whichever this case genuinely requires, on site rather than referred out.
For anything ceramic, the technician is half the result. A dentist who cannot name theirs is outsourcing blind.
Smile Makeover FAQ
What people ask us about smile makeover.
Including the cost question, answered with a real range rather than a request to call.
It depends entirely on the combination. Whitening with bonding on four teeth might be $2,500 to $5,000. Ten porcelain veneers with gum recontouring runs $15,000 to $30,000. Add orthodontics and full arch restoration and it exceeds $50,000. Any credible practice quotes phase by phase after the design, not before it.
A veneer-and-whitening makeover is typically three to six weeks. If alignment is being corrected first with aligners or braces, six to eighteen months. Building in orthodontics almost always improves the result and reduces how much tooth structure is removed.
That is a design decision, not an inevitability. Fake looks come from uniform brightness, identical tooth shapes and edges that ignore the lower lip. Specify natural translucency and slight asymmetry, insist on a trial smile, and look at the dentist portfolio for results you would not have identified as dentistry.
A protocol that uses your photographs and video to design the smile in software, then prints it as a physical mock-up for you to wear. Its value is that it moves the decisions to a point where they are still reversible, and gives the laboratory an exact target rather than an adjective.
Yes. A common sequence is orthodontics, then whitening, then ceramics on the front teeth, spread over a year or more. The design must be complete before stage one so that each stage moves toward the same endpoint.