“A lot of the clients that we have, at least in the two years that I’ve been here, it’s the natural look that people want to achieve and didn’t get to achieve the first time around,” Aro told me.
One of these clients was a female patient, who flew in from Miami to have Sands replace a set of veneers that had been done a decade earlier by a different dentist. The work had never pleased her, and since Sands had a good reputation among her other plastic surgeons, she didn’t mind that he was “much more expensive” than other candidates for the job. Hearing this remark, Sands pointed at his patient’s Birkin bag and said, “She spent $100,000 on her bag, she can afford it!” This kind of blunt humor is a sort of lubricant, I learned, for the kind of direct conversation necessary in these situations. Before long, Sands and his patient were discussing whether it was too much Botox or too much lip filler that her smile was hiding behind. “I want to show more teeth,” she told him.
Next they decided on the shape of her new veneers, which they agreed would be whiter than her already very white old ones. This took some time to figure out, however, because the patient had come to believe she’d look better with a straighter smile, which is to say that she thought her two front teeth should be no longer than those on each side of them. Sands strongly disagreed with her on this point. “You make the side teeth a little shorter, always,” he told her. “Otherwise it looks masculine. It looks like dentures.”
She seemed to understand this, and yet she insisted there was a trend toward straighter, squarer-looking veneers, particularly among younger women. Before acquiescing to his expert opinion, she wanted to be reassured that this beauty trend was not about to become the next beauty standard. Most of all, I sensed, she just didn’t want to look old. Later, I learned that this was not uncommon, and that these patients, like any other person dealing with their dentist, often needed to hear the same advice over and over before they could accept it.
Later on, the female patient was reclining comfortably and Sands was removing her old veneers, which, he told me, had caused a bit of damage to her gums. “The other dentist placed the veneers too high up on the tooth,” he said, as if to remind me that there was more at stake than appearances. From a seat in the hallway, just a few feet away, I peered through the open door while he worked, trying to put my finger on what seemed different—this was the same thing he’d done a day earlier on the princess, but she was still conscious. Unlike most patients who endure an hours-long veneers procedure, she insisted on proceeding without general anesthesia. Her reason was she doesn’t like feeling drowsy, but it’s possible she hoped to avoid the basic medical risk of being put under, or one common risk patients take by sleeping through their veneer procedures: If unable to give feedback on how it feels to bite down on their temporary crowns, they sometimes end up with an odd bite pattern that later needs to be adjusted. In the meantime they are vulnerable, especially if they are famous, as they struggle to speak and smile normally.
