subject: Dentition Interpretations [print this page] When it comes to the eyes, they are said to be the mirrors of the soul but there is a San Francisco cosmetic dentist who says that the teeth can actually say a lot about a person from age to gender as well as characteristics such as intelligence, sexiness, and aggressiveness.
In terms of conveying personality traits and emotional messages, he said that the mouth and teeth especially the six upper front teeth come in second to the body. Like a handful of American dentists, he limits his practice to cosmetic work.
The location of this dentist's clinic is on fashionable Union Street and after he let go of the conventional drill and fill business many years ago he uses his patients' dentition to interpret their images and then recasts them in porcelain or plastic. Buck teeth imply people are dumb. People with strong chins are seen as macho while those with weak chins are considered passive.
You will look like a hick if you are a man with a gap between two front teeth but for women it is seen as something sexy.
It is the two upper front teeth which show age. Appearing more youthful are long central incisors with irregular edges like that of an 8 year old. Someone who has been biting for 60 years will already have flat, short teeth.
Considering the teeth on either side that signify gender these are the lateral incisors and rounded edges appear more feminine while straight ones appear to be masculine. On several occasions, a patient who is a size 6 will have the teeth of a heavyweight boxer and if this is the case they can be reshaped with a rotary diamond stone without the need for anesthesia. When it comes to overlapping front teeth a slight reshaping is all you need.
You can add a tiny fraction of an inch to the small central incisors and this would take years off your appearance according to him who was an art history major in college who sculpted and painted. This dentist's current art form includes capping, veneering, bleaching and bonding, for anywhere from $40 for reshaping a tooth to $15,000 for rebuilding a face from the nose down.
What he mentions is that his business is doing well with about 100 patients every month including victims of birth defects, accidents, and cosmetically botched up previous dental work as well as appearance conscious celebrities and international diplomats.
According to several psychological tests, when it comes to people and their smiles, each smile means a different thing. For one study, a single face with a variety of teeth superimposed on it was shown to 8,000 students, and they came up with pretty consistent impressions.
A high cure rate exists for the dentally defective from a model with the canines of a construction worker to an executive with the front teeth of a 12 year old. One victim of insipid incisors lost 50 pounds after he beautified her teeth, and a businessman whose canines were too low on the passive aggressive scale got a new job following his visit to the cosmetic dentist. It is not a matter of changing a life but making a person more confident.
To thank for cosmetic dentistry was the new high technology developments in dental plastics. In the last 100 years, the best thing to happen in dentistry was bonding which is an increasingly popular dental procedure that adds a plastic substance to teeth.
In the mid 1970s bonding was restricted to repairing chipped teeth, but the development of a space age dental plastic that is harder, color stable and polishes like enamel has opened up many new applications. Apart from whitening teeth, included here are closing spaces, changing or matching tooth color, and masking minor crowding.
