Hollywood Smile
Hollywood Smile is a total makeover of your smile, i.e. a complete prosthetic reconstruction of both jaws using caps, veneers and, quite often, implants. Hollywood Smile involves placing dental crowns on all teeth, or at least on all visible teeth in both jaws, which means up to and including premolars. The term comes from the eponymous movie mecca and is used to evoke the brightly bleached teeth of Hollywood celebrities.
Hollywood Smile using veneers
A perfect white smile, i.e. Hollywood Smile, is achievable using veneers when the patient’s teeth are generally of sound quality, including the chipped ones, or having fillings or yellow colouring. A great number of celebrities will undergo this procedure. However, in practice, a common situation is that a patient would like a Hollywood Smile treatment using veneers, but are unaware that their teeth are not healthy enough, or properly aligned, or sufficient in number to wear veneers. The requirement is that all teeth including molars are present and that they are properly laid out. If they are not, we recommend getting fixed braces beforehand.
We take immense pleasure in creating a Hollywood Smile for patients using veneers, because it is the least invasive procedure possible which gives a remarkable transformation to your smile. But in reality, we are not given that opportunity very often.
Achieving a Hollywood Smile with crowns and bridges
A more common case is having a Hollywood Smile by placing crowns and bridges onto natural teeth, which has a medium level of complexity, halfway between using veneers and using implants with dental crowns. We go for this technique when the patient has at least half of their teeth in sound condition, with the other half having a healthy root and enough bulk to mount them with crowns. In a space where there are one or two teeth missing, a bridge may be placed without major complications, but if there are more teeth missing, then we have to introduce implants, which will serve as a preparatory procedure for a more complicated piece of prosthetic work.
Implants and Hollywood Smile
In our day to day practice, the Hollywood Smile is most commonly achieved using implants, since most patients do not have a sufficient number of teeth, and especially not enough healthy teeth for a veneer, crown, or bridge produced Hollywood Smile. First, the roots and teeth designated for extraction are pulled out because they will not be usable in the final work. This means that the patient will be partially or totally without teeth before placing implants into sockets where the teeth used to be. You can read more about the procedure of creating Hollywood Smile using implants in the following section.
Esthetically, the best effect is gained if the patient has, which is often not the case, their own teeth because the transition between the crowns or veneers and the gums is then the most natural. When it is estimated that the bone and gum defects are substantial, we make use of pink porcelain as a camouflage and to imitate gums, which is almost always the case in complete toothlessness where the level of bone deterioration is too great.
