How Our Dentists in Tunbridge Wells Make Smiles Beautiful

People are often surprised by how much of cosmetic dentistry happens before anything is done to a tooth. The treatment itself is the last step. Most of the work is deciding what the result should be, and that is a measuring exercise as much as an aesthetic one.

Here is roughly how that is approached, so it is less of a black box.

The face comes before the teeth

Teeth are not designed in isolation. The starting point is the whole face — its proportions, how it moves when you talk, where the teeth sit when the face is at rest. A set of teeth that would look right on someone else can look obviously wrong on you, and that is usually the giveaway when cosmetic work looks like cosmetic work.

Age, skin tone and the shape of the face all feed into decisions about size, shape and shade. So does what you actually want, which is asked rather than assumed.

The lips are the frame

You never see teeth on their own — you see them inside the frame the lips make. So the lip line does a lot of the work in the plan: how much tooth shows when you smile, how much gum, where the edges of the upper front teeth sit against the lower lip.

One guideline that gets used a lot: in a full smile, the upper front teeth typically fill somewhere between about three-quarters and all of the space between the lips. It is a starting reference, not a rule — plenty of perfectly good smiles sit outside it.

The midline

There is an imaginary vertical line down the centre of the face, and the gap between the two upper front teeth ideally sits on or near it. Where the face is not symmetrical — and almost nobody's is — other reference points get used, such as the centre of the upper lip.

Small deviations are normal and go unnoticed. It is worth knowing what is being looked at, because a midline that is visibly off is one of the few things people notice without being able to say why.

A plan, before any treatment

From all of that comes a plan: which teeth are involved, what is being done to each one, in what order, and what it costs. It might involve whitening, bonding, veneers, aligners to move teeth first, or nothing at all beyond a clean.

You should see that plan and agree to it before anything starts. If veneers or crowns are involved, you should also be told clearly how much tooth has to be removed, because that part does not grow back.

Arrangement matters more than whiteness

This is the thing most worth taking away. People arrive asking for whiter teeth, and colour is the easiest thing to change — but it is rarely what makes a smile look right or wrong. Arrangement is: how the teeth line up, how the edges run, whether the proportions look natural.

Which is why the honest answer is sometimes that the cheapest option is also the best one. Plenty of people who come in asking about veneers are better served by straightening what they already have, or by a clean and a modest amount of whitening.

This post was published in December 2020 and rewritten in September 2026. It is general information, not advice about your own teeth.

See our cosmetic dentistry page