Dr. Thomas Connelly turned the cliché “million dollar smile” into reality.
In 2021, the “Father of Diamond Dentistry” — as Rolling Stone named him — rebuilt Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds to replace the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Only diamonds.
Total cost: $1.6 million.
“Posty needed me. he had terrible teeth,” said Dr. Connelly, 51, sitting comfortably on a couch in one of his treatment rooms in his Beverly Hills office.
“We’ve learned a lot since doing Post’s mouth,” he said, adding that he and his three-member staff now do diamond dentistry almost daily, as well as making prosthetics like the six-figure titanium fabrication that Ye, formerly known as Kanye. West, revealed to the world in an Instagram story a few weeks ago.
Working with the jeweler and his associates in the dental lab, Dr. Connelly, a bodybuilder with a full scalp tattoo and almost complete tattoo sleeves on both arms, has recreated the mouths of rappers Gunna and Lil Yachty, professional boxer Devin Haney, and baseball pitcher Devin Haney. Marcus Stroman, Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr and more.
Full diamond teeth range from $100,000 to $2 million and porcelain veneers with diamond inlays from $10,000 to $75,000.
“This is not a trick,” he said. “We changed the profession a bit and pioneered something that caught on and made it a bit more mainstream.”
Mr. Malone’s reconstruction began in 2019 when, Dr. Connelly said, “we were in the green room at Madison Square Garden before a show and Post came up to me and asked, ‘Can you make my whole tooth into a diamond?’
The dentist was with Isaac Bokhoor, co-owner of Angel City Jewelers, a Los Angeles business popular with musicians. “Isaac and I answered at the same time. I go “yes” and Isaac “no” and Post just laughed. It made me think.”
It took about two years of experimentation and testing to work out the process of embedding a diamond into a porcelain or full gold-plated crown. At one point, Dr. Connelly said, he called Mr. Malone and told him he needed some money for diamonds: “He did. Isaac and I bought two $250,000 stones and completely destroyed them.”
“Everything we did didn’t work,” he recalls. “Either we made the diamond black or we broke it into pieces.”
Eventually an independent mechanical engineer worked out the process and Dr. Connelly developed it with the help of Naoki Hayashi, president of Ultimate Styles Dental Laboratory in Irvine, California (And, surprisingly, the photographer of Mr Malone’s dental work which became the cover of his 2023 album ‘The Diamonds Collection’.)
“We put jewels like rings on our fingers, why not our teeth?” Mr. Hayashi said through a translator.
Dr Connelly said that despite the innovative nature of his work, he chose not to patent the method because “then you have to explain your process. I only work with one man and there is trust.”
Less than a year after the diamond teeth, Mr. Malone returned to Dr. Connelly to replace the 10 porcelain veneers on his bottom teeth with platinum veneers (the same type the dentist himself has).
There have been some hiccups along the way. In mid-2022, the rapper bit into a Chicken McNugget while in Rome and one of the two fang diamonds fell out. It fell out again in October, while the musician was in Brazil. (In both cases he recovered the stone.) Now, Dr. Connelly said, he has made the settings more secure.
While Mr. Malone may have been the first with full diamond teeth, bejeweled dental decoration isn’t exactly new.
“Etruscan gold dental appliances: three recently ‘discovered’ examples,” a 1999 article by historian Marshall Joseph Becker in the American Journal of Archaeology, said, “the Etruscan origin of gold dental appliances, around the mid-seventh century B.C.E. has long been recognized. These appliances are all made of flat gold bands and are used to hold a false tooth or teeth in place.”
Tooth modifications span centuries and continents, and over the past couple of decades, they’ve added some serious flare to the rap and hip-hop music scene.
In 2005, rapper Nelly released the song “Grillz”, bringing the idea of extravagant dentures into modern popular culture. And it is music videowhich changed the idea that dentistry needed gold solely to add strength to a crown, included more than 70 jewels close to the mouth.
“Back then it was mostly gold,” said Elan Pinhasov, 27, who, along with his father, Gabby, owns jewelry brand Gabby Elan in New York. “The teeth were bigger and the diamonds were smaller.”
The younger Mr. Pinhasov said the business mostly customized removable grills and named LeBron James, Erykah Badu, Pharrell Williams and Kid Cudi among its clients. (He also noted that, thanks to social media, his customer base has shifted in recent years from 90 percent male to nearly 60 percent female.)
The most popular grills now, he said, cover one to three teeth, although the company has made a full set that covered 14 upper and 14 lower teeth. And at Gabby Elan, a basic gold tooth is $300. his most expensive piece was $6,500 per tooth.
“Grills no longer have to take up your entire mouth – they can be more delicate, smaller,” Mr Pinhasov said. “But they are still a focal point. When there’s something shiny on your teeth, people say “What’s that?” Isn’t it better to say a diamond than a piece of lettuce?’
Mr Bokhoor of Angel City Jewelers said he had also noticed the growing popularity of inconspicuous grills. “If you’re able to talk and sing, that attracts a whole new crowd,” he said from his office and studio in Los Angeles.
But the company, led by Mr Bokhoor, 36, and his partner, Sam Tack, 32, has expanded from steakhouses in recent years to supplying the gems to Dr. Connelly. They have worked together on a total of about 25 full diamond teeth and more than 100 diamond inlays, accounting for about 20 percent of Angel City’s total sales each year. The rest of their income came from selling watches and traditional jewelry such as custom-made chains and pendants.
“The No. 1 thing you see in a photo, the most dominant thing in a photo, is someone’s smile,” Mr. Bokhoor said. “Until recently people tattooed every part of their body. This is like tattooing your teeth.”
