Creating a natural smile requires a great deal of meticulous planning, that takes into account your natural features, including your face, lips, teeth and gums. As the only Digital Smile Design clinic, in Southern Africa, we follow the Five Smile Makeover Standards, to ensure beautiful natural smiles in harmony with the face.
These Five Smile Makeover standards are:
- Digitisation
- 3D Facial Design
- Digital treatment planning
- Trial Smile
- Guided Digital Dentistry
In this blog, we take a closer look at 3D Facial Design. If you would like to book your virtual smile consultation, click here.
What is 3D Facial Design?
After collecting your data during the digitisation phase, we use the DSD planning app to plan the best possible smile that will look natural and be in harmony with the rest of your facial features. This phase is also known as 3D Facial Design.
3D facial design is an important stage of creating the treatment plan for any smile makeover. We start planning your new smile, by looking at your face, and the positioning of your smile in relation to the rest of your facial features.
We then look at the shape, size arrangement, and colour of your teeth, getting these right makes the difference between teeth looking naturally beautiful or fake. It is not just the look of your teeth that can impact the overall appearance of a smile.
Feeling self-conscious about how much or how little gums show in relation to your teeth when you smile, is more common than you think! The gums are not just the space around the teeth: they give a smile its healthy appearance and impact how the teeth look. We address the amount of gum showing, during the 3D facial design phase.
The curve of the lips when smiling is also used during the design phase, to create the new smile line (where the edges of your teeth are) The smile line should follow the natural curve of the lips. The way the lips move when talking, smiling, and laughing has an important impact on how the smile looks. We take this into consideration when planning your smile makeover.
The Face
We use 3D facial software to clearly understand the position of the face’s vertical ‘midline’ and its horizontal plane, and make sure we align the new smile so it sits in balance with both.
Dr Mark Bowes used the facial midlines of this patient, to design the smile midline.
The Lips
When we design a new smile, we align the curve of the smile with the curve of the lip so that they are in harmony with each other at all times.
Dr Bowes used the natural smile curve, of the lips, to create the new smile curve.
The teeth
With 3D facial software, we incorporate little ‘imperfections’ that give teeth their real, natural beauty. This means that you’ll never end up with fake-looking teeth that stand out for the wrong reasons.
Dr Bowes uses a library of natural teeth, to select the shape, texture and colour.
The Gums
Using video, we can analyse how much gum shows when smiling. Depending on how much or how little gum there is, we can shape and alter their appearance in relation with the other parts of the smile.
Dr Bowes paid special attention to the amount of gum showing.
Book your smile makeover consult!
We understand that it is a big decision to change the appearance of your teeth. As a Digital Smile Design Clinic, we provide natural smiles that are in harmony with your facial features, taking into account your face, lips, teeth and gums. Book your consultation here.
