“A lot of the clients we’ve had, at least in the two years I’ve been here, are the natural look that people want to achieve and they couldn’t achieve the first time,” Aro told me.
One of those clients was a female patient who flew from Miami to have Sands replace a set of veneers that had been done a decade earlier by a different dentist. The job had never pleased her, and since Sands had a good reputation among her fellow plastic surgeons, she didn’t mind that he was “much more expensive” than other candidates for the job. Hearing this comment, Sands pointed to his patient’s Birkin bag and said, “She spent $100,000 on her bag, she can afford it!” That kind of humor is a kind of lubricant, I’ve learned, for the kind of direct conversation required in these situations. Before long, Sands and his patient were debating whether her smile was behind too much Botox or too much lip filler. “I want to show more teeth,” she told him.
They then decided on the shape of her new veneers, which they agreed would be whiter than her already very white old ones. But this took me a while to figure out because the patient had come to believe that she would look better with a straighter smile, meaning that she believed her two front teeth should be no longer than the ones on either 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 insisted that there was a trend towards straighter, squarer veneers, particularly among younger women. Before accepting the expert’s opinion, she wanted to reassure herself that this beauty trend wasn’t going to become the next beauty standard. Most of all, I felt, she just didn’t want to look old. Later, I learned that this was not unusual and that these patients, like everyone else dealing with their dentist, often needed to hear the same advice over and over again before they could accept it.
Later, the patient was lying comfortably and Sands was removing her old veneers, which she told me had caused some damage to her gums. “The other dentist placed the veneers too high on the tooth,” he said, as if to remind me that there was more at stake than just appearances. From a seat in the corridor, only a few feet away, I peered through the open door as he worked, trying to put my finger on what seemed different—this was the same thing he had done a day earlier to the princess, but he still had the her senses. Unlike most patients who endure an hour-long veneer procedure, she insisted on proceeding without general anesthesia. Her reason was that she doesn’t like feeling drowsy, but it’s possible that she was hoping to avoid the major medical risk of undergoing or a common risk patients take by sleeping through their veneer procedures: If she can’t give feedback on how she feels they bite. 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 find it difficult to talk and smile normally.
