How well you function in society can be defined by how well you smile.
A smile is a person’s ability to express a range of emotions with the structure and movement of the teeth and lips.
The search for the perfect smile can be traced to the earliest civilizations – Phoenicians (800 BC) and Etruscians (900 BC) carefully carved animal tusks to simulate the shape, form, and hue of natural teeth.
It was not until the 18th century that dentistry and its various branches was recognized as a separate discipline.
Pierre Fauchard (1678-1761) of France, the leader of the movement, together with several colleagues, modernized and promoted dentistry and advocated esthetic practices.
This piece is going to talk about designing the perfect smile.
So, what goes into smile designing?
The teeth, tissues, muscles, skeletal structures, and joints have to function in harmony. Achieving a successful, healthy, functional, and esthetic design requires understanding the interrelationship among all the oral support structures – the muscles, bones, joints, gingival tissues, and occlusion.
Facial and dental integration
You will have to look at the perfect integration of facial composition and dental composition.
The facial composition includes the hard and soft tissues of the face. The dental composition relates more specifically to teeth and their relationship with gingival tissues.
It would help if you restricted your smile makeover to the dental composition when there is no apparent discrepancy in the face.
Facial features
When you are looking at facial features, here are a few that you need to look at for the facial analysis while designing a perfect smile:
- Interpupillary line – is perpendicular to the midline of the face and parallel to the occlusal plane
- Midline – it runs through the anterior nasal spine. This runs precisely through the contact area between the maxillary central incisors
- Incisal plane – is an auxiliary plane that runs parallel to the interpupillary line at the height of the central incisors’ incisal edges. This assists in determining the occlusal plane and the smile line
- Smile line – is the lower lip line’s curvature parallel to the maxillary incisal edges’ curvature. If the edges of the teeth follow the natural curvature of the lower lip during smiling, the smile is felt to be friendly
The tooth shape should also be considered while designing the smile. The shape of the teeth should match the shape of the face and reflect the individual’s facial type and characteristics.
The other factor to consider would be the width-to-the-length ratio of the maxillary central incisors and the proportion of the central incisors’ visible width in relation to the later incisors and the canines.
The principle of ideal esthetic proportions uses the golden ratio that can be seen in the maxillary anterior teeth’ visible tooth surfaces. The perfect ratio between the length and width of the maxillary incisors is 1 to 0.8.
With all of these, you are most likely to provide the perfect smile for your patients.