Kate Moss & Jessica Alba: The Most Requested Smiles
Photo: Steve Granitz/WireImage
From braces to veneers to torturous root canals, I’ve spent many an afternoon in the dentist chair in my own quest for a brilliant smile. But per Dr. Michael Apa, a cosmetic dentist on the Upper East Side who tends to the grins of Matt Dillon, Vera Wang, Chloe Sevigny and Middle Eastern royalty, uniformly braced and retainer-ed teeth like mine are so out of fashion. In fact, many of his peers are still getting it wrong, he says, by churning out Julia Roberts teeth—the old standard. “Dentists used to design to the golden proportions of the mouth and not what worked for the person’s face,” he says, adding that there was also a tendency to go too-straight and too-white. “It didn’t look natural. Everyone knew you had work done.”
Instead, in New York at least, the trend in recent years has been to enhance teeth without letting on that you’ve spent a fortune. “Just as facelifts have become more natural, everyone woke up and said ‘I don’t want to look like a freak. I just want to look like a better version of myself,’” Dr. Apa says.
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So how do you get the celebrity treatment? For $20,000 to $60,0000, Dr. Apa dispenses with standard fare in favor of a customized treatment. More often than not, this requires a set of veneers: ceramic coverings for your teeth that are so sophisticated that Dr. Apa now offers both custom colors and textures. If you’re ready to commit, he’ll make a model of try-on chompers for you to take home. They’re usually is a combination of what he thinks will suit your face and what you want. These days, people in search of new teeth cite Kate Mossand Jessica Alba as inspiration, Brigitte Bardot, too.
Dr. Apa eschews perfection. If you have a couple of rotated teeth, pointy canines or a gap, Dr. Apa might preserve these quirks. It’s all about your facial proportions and some je ne sais quoi. “Big canines can be really playful,” he says. “And a gap is often part of the person’s personality.” (Adding a gap is another story. It may work for Bardot, but adding a space where there isn’t one can be a real shock to your visage, he cautions.)
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If you’re looking to sex up your toothy grin, Dr. Apa points out that Bardot has both a gap and two longer teeth in front. When done right (meaning in proportion to your face and not too bucky), prominent front teeth can give you the kind of toothsome model pout made famous by Moss. In fact, Dr. Apa is such the expert on photogenic grills, that he’s the dentist of record for both Wilhelmina and Elite models. “The bookers in the modeling agency are one hundred percent in the know about these types of things,” he says, adding that his European clientele is particularly disdainful of stereotypical American teeth.
Perhaps not surprisingly, teeth have followed the rest of fashion: big blowouts and too much makeup feels all wrong. Whereas the best version of yourself—even if it’s a little quirky or off-kilter—is always right. Or, as Dr. Apa puts it, “What’s hip and cool now is not Upper East Side. It’s really that Lower East Side look.”
