Ceramic dental veneers are associated with “looking better,” something people everywhere increasingly desire. Aesthetic dental treatments and cosmetic cures effect economic growth. They help increase the global GDP. Preparing veneers is no sweat for dentists. And since, as everybody knows, they make us spend a lot of money, they help boost the economy!
Feeling insecure in public, or, having “social anxiety,” as the shrinks term it, sparks an ongoing, irrational fear in how others see us. That’s in the West. In Japan, people are more sensitive about offending others. In China, they worry about the dishonor connected to not working enough. Instead, here in Italy, if you work on Saturday you’re considered a loser!
In the USA the most widespread fear is being judged negatively by others. To combat this, as Schopenhauer noted, outer appearance, or beauty, is a letter of recommendation that immediately wins hearts over.
A pleasing smile is basic to the idea of human beauty today. Have you ever asked yourself why this is so only in recent times?
In paintings and sculptures of past eras, extending from the ancient Greeks up to the Second World War, no one who smiled showed their teeth. At most, there’d be a glimpse of an enigmatic smile like the Mona Lisa’s. Tight-lipped as she was, we can only guess what her teeth must have looked like!
True local anesthesia began in 1943 with Lidocaine. It took some thirty years before dentists learned how to administer the dosages correctly so as not to traumatize their poor patients.
Having a nice smile has become essential. Teeth are an essential part of our faces. Our teeth, more importantly than our eyes generate smiles. Teeth and their shape, color and position are all essential to our verbal and non-verbal expression.
So, to summarize:
We’re all nervous about how others see us.
Dental aesthetics grow GDP and the bank accounts of dentists.
A smile is basic to communicating.
Finally, there’s the importance of skilled local anesthesia today.
I go to my dentist and apply a ceramic dental veneer to have white teeth.
It’s simple. An estimate, two sessions, and off I go to increase the ranks of the beautiful people…the real ones, those with white teeth.
Accordingly, I’ve searched the web and found thoughts like these:
“Let’s give ourselves the gift of a healthy and beautiful smile with an easy dental aesthetics treatment.”
“A pleasant smile is the basis for feeling liked. Dental veneers have been created by cosmetic dentistry to restore a good look to teeth damaged by trauma or disease.”
“Thanks to the modern techniques of dental aesthetics dental studio xxxx and yyyy return beauty and radiance to smiles in just a few sessions and without invasive treatment.”
“And this is the field of aesthetic dentistry, the phase that follows clinical treatment and isn’t limited just to techniques to make teeth whiter and false teeth more realistic looking.”
“Aesthetic dentistry also deals with how teeth are used, their shape, aspects of mastication and the tissue sensitivity. This makes the secret of a nice smile a mix between well-being, how the mouth works, colors and the harmony of various elements.”
Perhaps expressing themselves in the original Italian wasn’t the strong point of those who wrote the above. They likely attended a trade school and then a dental faculty.
Most of the statements offer at most a cursory explanation of how dental veneers are made. It all seems simple, merely a technical matter that the dentist and dental technician need to resolve.
Totally ignored is the fact we are discussing aesthetics and beauty, two concepts that have fascinated philosophers and intellectuals for some 2500 years! It’s ridiculous to imagine that dentists can deal with these weighty issues in two sessions.
The idea of beauty has been explained in various ways over time. For Aristotle and Plato, it was, along with truth and virtue, one of the three highest values. Strictly speaking, the ancients couldn’t live without an idea of beauty. Visible beauty was called symmetry, while audible beauty was called harmony.
Pythagoras introduced the notion of proportion connected to beauty. His so-called golden proportion, created in the 6th century B.C. and symbolized by the Greek letter Phi (Φ), was approximately equal to 1.618 and considered by many as “beautiful.” It was also called the “divine proportion” often found in nature. For example, in the Nautilus shell, the relationship between the sections is approximately 1.618.
There’s also the ratio between two successive numbers, 89/55, in the series called Fibonacci, named after a 13th century mathematician. It reoccurs in many natural occurrences and has been used by dentistry to determine the correct relationship between various upper front teeth (the central incisor, the lateral incisor and the canine).
The idea of intelligible beauty assumes that objective standards of beauty exist. Beauty in this sense is measurable and, on the basis of measurements and calculations, is evident to everyone. Until the beginning of modern times, this conception of beauty dominated both theory and practice.
However, starting with Mannerism in the 16th century and then with the Baroque, it’s clear that beauty is synonymous with order and rules and that there’s something more to it, what Petrarch called the “I know not what.”
It’s this enigmatic “something,” this “I know not what” that establishes what beauty is, an essence that’s uncountable and immeasurable, something that’s reached, that artistic genius introduces. This means all the older preconceptions are essentially worthless, given that no solid shared criteria to base a standard on exist. In this context, one has to have what’s called “taste.”
In 1750 the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten published Aesthetica in Latin. The word “Aesthetica” originates from the Greek words αἴσθησις (aistesis) which means “feeling,” and the verb αἰσθάνομαι (aistanomai), which means “to perceive through the mediation of a sense.” This aesthetic is that type of knowledge obtained through use of the senses, understood as the study of sense perception, or, knowledge acquired through the senses, which is opposite but complementary to that obtainable through the mind.
“Beauty is not inherent to things themselves: it only exists in the mind that contemplates it and each mind perceives a different beauty.” — David Hume, On the rule of taste, 1757.
In 1790 Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Judgment, considered a Copernican revolution.
Beauty was no longer an objective, measurable quality inherent to things. In this view, “beauty” in and of itself no longer existed. Instead it’s humans that attribute qualities like “beauty” to things.
This led to the notion of “a sense of beauty”: an aesthetic judgment that results from the integration of sensory perception with what the mind produces (Jung’s idea of the unconscious).
This idea of a product made by the mind indicates that the mind is able to affect our senses.
The sense of beauty is, according to Kant:
• pure: it doesn’t depend on the object itself;
• disinterested: it doesn’t have an ulterior motive;
• universal: it’s spontaneously experienced by everyone as something beautiful;
• necessary: it’s something on which everyone necessarily agrees, but not because it can be explained intellectually.
The nature of the debate next shifts to a characteristic of beauty. One begins to wonder if, when an object is designated as beautiful, it possesses a certain property or not.
This takes a basically objective conception to a subjective state and makes it necessary to abandon any idea of a fixed and rigorous definition of the aesthetic term “beautiful.”
Today, in these high-tech times, explaining “beauty” is even more complex.
For this reason, it seems appropriate to focus attention on the beautiful result, i.e., the artistic product: it’s made by the activity of a creator, an artist, who then submits it to the judgment of others who assess its value.
The artistic product is the result of a creative act, which implicitly makes the idea of “creativity” subversive.
The word creativity always includes a sense of unpredictability, which is a thought process that totally transcends standard protocols in order to influence the concept of what modern “beauty” means. Beauty, in these terms, is spontaneous, original and generates individual responses.
When value judgments are attributed to this creative act it becomes art.
But what does this have to do with the aesthetics of a smile or ceramic dental veneers?
Does it suffice to see some photos and analyze models; do a “mock-up,” as dentists and a good dental technician call it?
Maybe this issue is a bit more complicated.
My next essay will analyze the “dynamics of the smile” in detail and how to carry out dental rehabilitation with veneers while keeping in mind the patient’s face.
Dr. Massimo Mazza
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