No one wants their fake teeth to look fake anymore

Some patients are no longer looking for veneers, dentist-created coverings that fit over the tooth enamel, to turn their teeth uniform and blindingly white. Instead they want to polish little imperfections, but not obscure them completely.

“The pendulum has swung back in the direction of undetectable," says cosmetic dentist Jon Marashi, whose practice is in Brentwood, Calif.

One of his patients, Jeffrey Seabold, 57, who works in financial services in Los Angeles, was a longtime grinder. “My bottom teeth and front teeth were all straight but short from being ground down," Seabold says. “Fixing my teeth has always been in the back of my mind."

But Seabold shelved the idea for a while after seeing a friend’s dental work. “He got these chiclets," he says. “They looked absolutely fake. You noticed it right away, and it really changed his appearance." Seabold wanted a dental shift that was more subtle. “I’m in my early fifties and pretty established and I didn’t want the change to be too noticeable to my friends and colleagues," he says of his eventual veneers, which made his teeth longer without radically altering his smile.

Our real teeth have slight imperfections and irregularities—something slightly off-center, a microchip, a gap—which is what, many would argue, gives a smile personality. They’re also not bright white. “They’re bright in the center, a little more translucent on the bottom, with a little more warmth up at the gumline," says Marashi, who believes veneers can and should mirror these nuances. “Mother nature doesn’t make teeth carbon copies of one another and neither should dentistry."

New York-based cosmetic dentist Marc Lowenberg, a partner at LLK Dental, sees the process as a collaborative one between dentist, ceramicist and patient. “You’re creating something more natural-looking but also more natural to that specific person," he says. So you can get the veneers, and preserve the canine teeth and that crooked incisor and the center gap.

That approach was key for New York photographer and art director Tatijana Shoan, 50. “My teeth weren’t aging well," she says. They were thin, so they chipped easily and whitening treatments never stuck, and they were shifting with age so her mouth looked overcrowded. “When I smiled, it looked like I was missing teeth in the back," says Shoan, who was hesitant about veneers after seeing so many phony versions on actors while working on photo-shoot sets. Lowenberg’s practice designed her veneers to enhance her high cheekbones and narrow jaw, and reflect a younger version of her smile. “People keep complimenting me and asking what skincare I’m using or what I had done," she says.

Marashi likens this pivot to subtlety to what’s happening in cosmetic dermatology: “Just as things got overdone with too much Botox and overfilled duck lips, the same is true with teeth," he says. Nowadays, 50% of Marashi’s practice is devoted to revision dentistry,  fixing bad work. “It’s patients coming in and saying, ‘get these crazy white things out of my mouth and make my teeth look natural,’" said Marashi.

Tatiana Dorow, 43, the founder of the Dorow Collection, a line of crystals and jewelry, had Marashi fix her teeth after going to three dentists in the Hawaiian islands who made her teeth “wider and whiter than everything else in my mouth," she says. “They looked like painted Barbie teeth." With Marashi, she was surprised at how involved the process was. He looks at someone’s skin tone and hair, but also asks about the colors they tend to wear most often and how they do their makeup as he conceives of the right veneer shade. “I went from a dentist who gave me literally two color options to someone who created something custom for me," Dorow says, adding that the picture-taking and color and design conversations took as long as the actual veneer procedure. Her porcelain veneers are done by hand, instead of digitally, and layered in a way that allows light to transmit through, a hallmark of a real tooth.