Description
As Dr. Everett Heringer explains, the creation of a new smile begins with the two front teeth. During your smile evaluation, Dr. Heringer examines your smile, takes X-rays, creates wax-ups, and discusses your unique needs. By working methodically, Dr. Heringer is able to understand what your needs are, create a mockup of what your smile could look like, create temporaries, and then finish your smile.
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Really, the smile begins with your two front teeth. First, as you build your smile you start with your two front teeth and you build back. Then you bring the bottom teeth to match the top teeth. You're going to come in for a consultation and we do a lot of photography. We do photos of what they look like before. We do images of what they could look like afterwards. We also do wax-ups and models of them, what they actually will look like.
Before I even touch their tooth with anything, whether it's the laser or the drill, we're going to spend about four to six hours together. I want to make sure I gather all the data. I want to understand totally what their needs or concerns are and what their wants are. Once I understand all that, and once I have a clear picture of what we're going to be doing and the direction we're going to go, then we'll sit down and I'll give them our final estimates and move forward, and try to make it affordable for them.
So the smile evaluation appointment is very, very key for them. It's educational, it's enlightening, and also gives me a sense of direction, which way the patient wants to go. I want the patient to be in control and understand every step along the way so there are no surprises. I don't like luck to play into my smiles. I want it to be very methodically done.
The first way I do my smiles is in my head, so I tell my patients they need to get into my head what they don't like about their smile and what they want. Number two, the second way I do my smiles, I create some sort of image or template of them so they can visually feel and hold what their smile could look like in the form of models. Then the third way we do it is whether the day we prep their teeth, we make them temporaries and they wear those temporaries for anywhere from three weeks to a month. They have plenty of time to love them or not like them. If there's anything they don't like about them, we tweak it in the temporaries, and after they love their trial smile, then we'll go ahead and send it to the lab.
I work with what I believe is one of the best labs in the United States. It's out in California. In fact, it's the DaVinci Lab. Then when it comes back into my hands, myself and the patient are in control, but there shouldn't be any surprises, and luck shouldn't play into it.
That's what's involved in a smile evaluation. It gets you to the point where the patient can make an educated decision, both financially and also what it's going to look like, to say let's move ahead and go with it. And I'm going to give them options, and how we're going to stage it. That's the whole process of smile evaluation. Then after that, we'll start the treatment. We spend sometimes two days together, one day on the top arch, one day on the bottom arch. They walk out with temporaries that are beautifully gorgeous, exactly what, there's no surprise for them.
