Keeping the Gums Healthy Means a Healthy Smile
Cosmetic dentistry is more popular than ever, and people want to improve their smile to boost their confidence and change their look. One of the aspects of smile design that people and dentists sometimes overlook is the effect that healthy gums have in the way the smile looks. This blog, part of our series on common cosmetic dentistry mistakes, discusses how gums can impact the smile, the need for cosmetic treatments, and what happens if you don’t take them into account.
Mistake # 6: Ignoring The Gums
When tasked with improving a patient’s smile, it’s easy for dentists to become too focused on the teeth, forgetting about how the healthy gums and lip line affect it. Both are critical to consider when diagnosing the patient and treatment planning for cosmetic dentistry. I have had many patients who asked me about veneers to lengthen their teeth when their teeth were not the problem; their gums or lip line was.
Gummy Smiles and High Lip Lines
The proportions of everything on your face are relative and sometimes the prominence of one feature leads to the apparent obscurity of another. The same goes for your smile. Some patients appear to have short teeth because their lip line is very high when they smile. Others have what’s affectionately known as a “gummy smile” that causes their teeth to look smaller. A gummy smile can be a result of many factors including overgrowth of the maxilla (your upper jaw), over-active muscles (which pull your smile way too high up), or simply excess gum tissue.
Get a Grip On Smile Design
Understanding Smile Design is key to diagnosis and proper treatment planning in these types of cases because adding prominence to a feature that is obscured by another prominent feature could result in both features looking unnatural and out of place. A case of lengthening teeth by placing longer veneers on them may actually be a case that needs work on the gums. Simply raising the gums can achieve beautiful results with a less invasive treatment plan.
Cosmetic Dentistry – Get Up To Speed
This blog post is the last in our series explaining some of the most common cosmetic dentistry mistakes. More general dentists and new dentists are offering cosmetic dentistry procedures to their patients because demand from patients has grown. Most of the time the results are great however both patients and dentists can educate themselves better about the considerations and pitfalls of cosmetic treatments to prevent common mistakes.
Visit Dr. Agatha Bis who has been practicing cosmetic and restorative dentistry for over 20 years. During that time Dr. Bis and her team at her Oakville dental clinic have experienced the increase in demand for services such as veneers, teeth whitening and overall smile makeovers. Call 905.338.6684 to make an appointment about your smile makeover, and read about the other Common Cosmetic Dentistry Mistakes in our previous blogs.
Dr. Agatha Bis has been whitening and brightening smiles for over 20 years. Get in touch with us about restorative cosmetic dentistry in Oakville using the form below or by calling us at 905.338.6684 then read the other blog posts in this series on Common Cosmetic Dentistry Mistakes.
This blog is the sixth in a six-part series about the common mistakes made in cosmetic dentistry.