Julia Roberts, they’re coming for you. Tom Cruise, you’re up. Nice documentaries, Ryan Reynolds and David Beckham, but not nice enough. Football guy who takes Taylor Swift out to dinner? You too. The cosmetic dentists would like a word.
The teeth of America have never been whiter, straighter, or more even. They’re as luminous as a South Sea pearl. And, as it tends to happen, some of these teeth are too white, too straight, and too even. As luminous as a Chiclet. “They’re supposed to look like teeth,” says Dr. Michael Apa, the cosmetic dentist of Apa Aesthetic, the luxurious clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, and, soon, Miami. “You’re not supposed to notice them.”
But who can keep from noticing? They’re everywhere, starting at the top. Yes, you, President Biden. Dr. Apa is concerned that these big, blinding teeth are tarnishing the reputation of veneers. “It gives them a really bad name,” he tells me. “It’s like hair transplants.”
So many of these teeth are “out too far or they’re up too short, or they’re slanted to one side, but they’re perfectly straight,” he says. “And that’s for the good cosmetic dentists.... If you really start to look, you can see a bad set of veneers.”
“The bad ones are the ones that are so obvious,” he says.
Dr. Tyler Hales, a cosmetic dentist in Orange County, tells me, “Pretty much all the celebrities have done smile makeovers.” If you don’t believe him, just try watching Risky Business, After Hours, Working Girl—really any movie from the 80s. All you can see are misaligned teeth.
Even Taylor Swift is not immune. At least one TikTok doc believes she snuck in a re-do in late September to fix a chipped tooth and, apparently, make a few other adjustments. “Her canines [were] too bulky for me,” says Dr. Hales. Now they’re just the right amount of perfect.
And yet for every Taylor Swift there is a Rudy Giuliani. His porcelained teeth are so obvious they almost take your mind off the hair. Why do so many teeth makeovers go so terribly wrong? Dr. Apa believes the problem is partly one of perspective. Dentists are trained to look at the mouth and only the mouth. They go to dental conferences and display “gigantic blown-up pictures of just the teeth” on the screen. “They look gorgeous, but it’s just the teeth,” says Dr. Apa. “If you take the same set of teeth and plug them into different people’s faces at different ages or different times of their life, they’ll always look off.”
“Pretty much all the celebrities have done smile makeovers.”
When the face changes from age or intervention, the teeth inevitably look distorted. The latest example is something we’ll call Ozempic mouth, when the body suddenly loses weight, and teeth seem to gain it. “You look like a skeleton with your teeth jutting way out because your cheeks are sucked in,” says Dr. Apa. “It’s a problem. And we see it all the time.”
Facelifts and lip lifts bring similar effects. They change the contours and fullness of the face, and suddenly people call their dentists, alarmed that their smiles look lopsided.
A skilled cosmetic dentist takes all this into account, asking a team of ceramists to paint each veneer by hand to suit the face as if they’re designing a couture gown. Just the other week, Dr. Hales had a patient who believed, like Voltaire, that perfect is the enemy of good. “She said, ‘I don’t like having perfect teeth.’”
“So we’re building in some imperfections where the edges aren’t straight across but have a little bit of character,” he says.
What’s perfect for an actor, singer, newscaster, or influencer is not the same as perfect for you and me. (And please note: my teeth are so flawed that I conducted these interviews over Zoom like a ventriloquist, without ever opening my mouth.) “For anyone who’s got a camera on them, you have to be careful,” says Dr. Apa. “Anytime you put ceramic on someone’s teeth and then put a light on it, it’s going to look brighter than it does in real life.... If they’re a serious actor—and we have plenty of them—you have to really tone down the color.” (Dr. Apa sent me a patient list that included Jennifer Lopez, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Uma Thurman, Emma Roberts, Kendall Jenner, Ramona Singer, and Kyle Richards. Dr. Hales also draws from the Bravo universe, with patients Madison LeCroy and Jax Taylor. And if you don’t recognize many of these names, congratulations.)
Even those who are known for their smiles might eventually need some help in that department. Dr. Apa is itching to get his hands on Julia Roberts, of all people. “There used to be this beautiful wide smile, and now she’s got long gums, she’s lost bone, and she has little black triangles between her teeth,” he says. “She could really turn the clocks back.” Dr. Hales has his sights set on Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes. “I’m a huge Chiefs fan,” he tells me.
Good thing, because this makeover is not for the weak. Dr. Hales charges $2,500 per tooth; Dr. Apa’s rate is $5,000. Patients often try to reduce the cost by only doing the most visible teeth; the four on the top row. “But that’s like doing a facelift on only one half of your face,” says Dr. Apa. Most of Dr. Hales’s patients get veneers on at least the top 10 teeth. And nearly everyone thinks they can skip the bottom row, which most people don’t see when they smile. “Why bother making beautiful top teeth when you know that they’re going to look terrible against the bottoms?” Dr. Apa asks. To prove his point, he takes a video of his patients while they speak and plays it back. The bottom teeth always show when they talk.
These cosmetic dentists are setting out to change not only smiles but the entire tooth-improving experience. Dr. Apa, inspired by Brunello Cucinelli’s stores, hired architects and interior designers to create his centers from materials other than Formica. There’s art on the walls, technicians in skinny suits, and a support staff culled from the luxury-hotel industry. He wants people to feel as if they’re visiting a hair salon, which is also not covered by insurance. “It’s more of a celebration of yourself. You feel good when you leave.”
The best way to take care of your teeth is to go to the dentist, he says. The other best way to take care of your teeth is to become a personage, even if only on Bravo. Before we end our chat, Dr. Hales manifests his dreams aloud. “If you know any good celebrities … ” he says. I tell him—without moving my lips—that I’ll be on the lookout.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look