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“A smile is the shortest distance between two people.” -Victor Borge
A smile has widely been labeled as a universal greeting that transcends languages and customs. Smiling individuals are viewed as more pleasant and trustworthy, where individuals who experience facial neuromuscular disorders that impair their ability to smile demonstrate more severe self-reported depressive symptoms. The act of smiling releases endorphins that have been shown to improve the mood of both the person who smiles and individuals who see them smiling! Given these widespread social, physical, psychological, financial, and other impacts, a smile is critical to an individual’s wellbeing and is a fundamental component to perceived beauty. As dental healthcare professionals, the impact that we can have on our patients through the creation, maintenance, and enhancement of their smiles is powerful and our understanding of the current and evolving “gold standards” of beauty is critical to our ability to impact our patients and their esthetics positively.
An ideal smile is composed of individual components that interact in a harmonic manner. The three primary aspects of an ideal smile are: the teeth, lips, and gingiva. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, there are established guidelines to which we should adhere when assessing and creating overall ideal smile esthetics. Factors that contribute to smile assessment include:
While all these factors are important individually, their overall interaction and harmony is critically important when assessing ideal esthetics. This course seeks to describe the current evidence assessing ideal smile components and the impact of age, gender, and race/ethnicity on how smiles are judged as attractive or unattractive.
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