Gum Reshaping / Gummy Smile Treatment

One of the things that we evaluate when we look at smile design is where are the gum levels or where’s the lip line when the patient smiles. If the patient smiles and shows a lot of gum tissue, that can be something that is it makes a big impact on their smile and some patients don’t think about that until we start looking at the mock-up. If you look at a lot of celebrities these days, there actually are a lot of celebrities that have gummy smiles. Our goal is to help patients understand how a gummy smile may impact, say, a final result when we’re talking about a smile makeover and if we look at a mock-up and say yes, oh my gosh, that would look so much better if the gums were a little bit higher and then we start talking about how can we get to that result.

That can be a very conservative approach, actually. We have what’s called a carbon dioxide laser, which is extremely conservative way of just slightly removing a little bit of gum tissue and enabling a tooth to look a little bit longer and to show less gum. Sometimes, we also look at symmetry, so you want the right and left side of the patient’s face to look very much the same. Sometimes, there’s an easy solution to try to enable that to happen.