Have teeth.. Will Smile!!

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have some idea of what I'm going to talk about. For those who don't, this Wednesday I had a dreaded dentist appointment to fix a filling I'd been putting off for a year. While there, my dentist decided to gently coax me into another procedure he'd been trying to get me to do for the past year I'd been avoiding him- he wanted to fix my gummy smile. For those who don't know what a gummy smile is, it's when a person smiles and their top gums show more than their teeth. Now while that doesn't really sound like the biggest deal, it can actually be quite a pain for those who are in possession of this curious problem as it can ruin many a photograph! All my "nice" photographs are those carefully posed ones which along with getting the right angle, lighting, position, etc, hide along with any shadow of a double chin, the unsightly pink gums in my mouth. You know happy pictures of people laughing that are captured without them knowing the camera is upon them? There isn't a single one of me out there. Again, if you follow me in Twitter you may have seen the perfectly Photoshopped pictures of me that I use as my profile pic that were shot by the genius photographer Vikram Bawa in India a while back. It isn't a coincidence that you might see them change with different outfits and different poses, but with one thing remaining constant- my mouth tightly shut into a smile. While taking the photographs he'd wanted me to relax and tried to do so by talking to me, only to realize any pictures of me talking, or worse yet, laughing, would be completely unusable. Don't get me wrong, I don't have bad teeth... in fact, I don't have a single tooth out of place! It's just the gum factor that's gotten to me for all these years!
So back to Wednesday. I had done a bit of research on what I thought the procedure would entail and I had visions of a full fledged surgery. "It'll take 10 minutes and won't hurt a bit!" the Doc promised. "Am I really that vain to go ahead and do something as drastic as this?" I thought fleetingly to myself. Honestly, before I had the time to even properly answer that question, he was standing over me, syringe in hand, ready to numb my gums to start the procedure before I could change my mind.. or apparently even make it up. My Dentist you see has been bumping into me in social occasions and noticed how I'd always get shy and as a reflex action, covered my mouth with my hands every time I laughed or smiled wide. "Do the procedure, it'll change your face!" he promised me each time. An hour later, I was out of the clinic, my filling in place with a new smile to take home. I smiled to my Mother and asked her if she noticed anything different and she yelled, "I told you to not get your teeth whitened! It ruins the enamel and weakens the teeth!" Errr.. try again Mom! The next day in the office her Secretary who has been with us for a few decades noticed, "You've got your teeth cleaning done? Whitening? You've done something," she said. The difference is ever so slight that not many people can tell unless I point it out to them. All in all, it really did take approximately 15 minutes to do, and the Doc was right... it didn't really hurt. Since then my gums have just been a little sore and reactive to hot and spicy foods, but I can tell it's getting better and hopefully I should be fine by tomorrow. If you or a family member have a gummy smile or any issue with your teeth in general, I can't urge you enough to go fix it! Being able to be comfortable with yourself, especially your smile, is SO important! And then of course, you'll just have to work on finding something to always smile about! Unless you're him...

Image taken from here

 For those interested, my procedure was done by Dr. Anand Shenoy who is located in Satwa and whom I cannot recommend enough! He helped save a tooth of mine last year that needed a root canal (as it had been messed up by another Dentist) and I finally went to him after hearing rave reviews from a few friends as well as my older sister. While dentists in Dubai seem to be worried more about polishing up their own wallet rather than your teeth, I found him to be very conscious of not doing more than necessary. If you're looking for a good Dentist, definitely do give him a shot.
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