Why was Ellen DeGeneres’ tweet about 'the best selfie ever' so viral?
Social media is all around us. In fact, it has been since the event of human communication. Cave drawings and the ancient paintings of Egyptian monuments are prime examples of the dawn of social media of our civilization.
It is social media in its broadest sense which gives us a sense of community all over the world. This has become increasingly more evident with the event of the internet. It appears that we have finally have come home where mankind always wanted to be – connected within the human family.
The Oscars has been the social media pow-wow since its conception as the Academy Awards in 1929, which is, by the way, the only one that went unnoticed by a media audience. It has been ever since the meeting point of the masses’ attention. While none of us spectators may have been able to communicate with the familiar participants of the events, it made us feel connected to a certain degree.
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This patient had a variety of minor aesthetic issues. Her interdental papillae had receded as a natural phenomenon of aging. Her central incisors where slightly misaligned, off-color, and shaped asymmetrically. The left central incisor was to short compared to its width, leading to a square-shape look. There was a significant left-right asymmetry among all upper teeth. She also displayed discolored and deteriorating old dental restorations. The central downward curvature of the gum line was too extreme compared to the downward curvature of the inner border of the lower lip and the position and curvature of the upper lip.
What makes a smile beautiful? Many dental, oral, and facial parameters and the way they harmonize as a whole determine the aesthetic assessment of a smile. Throughout this website we are talking about specific shortcomings of the aesthetic zone of the dental arch and how it can be corrected with porcelain veneers. A very rare and rather challenging condition is that of a canted smile line and a canted dental midline (see the blue line in the upper image).
Ideally, the incisal edge follows the inner border of the lower lip, while the incisal plane is perpendicular to the dental midline. One of the most aesthetic parameters in human anatomy is symmetry. The human eye is very keen when it comes to the perception of differences of line angles. This is particularly applicable to the human face. While no face is perfectly symmetric, there is a threshold of variation, at which attention is drawn to the dissonance of facial harmony. Good examples are the facial asymmetries that are seen in stroke victims, asymmetric muscle tone after poorly balanced botox injections, and the paralysis of some facial muscles due to trauma or right after local anesthesia of oral tissue.
Baby boomers were born in the years between 1946 and 1964. By that time, they were about 76.4 million in the United States and made up almost 40 percent of the nation’s population. Baby boomers grew up at a time of great social change. They are therefore used to innovation and often demonstrate a remarkable degree of environmental awareness. These attributes also typify youth in general. Hence, a baby boomer who preserves them into older age, will display a youthfulness that is characterized by many things, such as a positive outlook on life, cheerfulness, a great sense of humor, an active life style, and of course a healthy and youthful body. Dictionaries define "youthfulness" as youthful enthusiasm and having the appearance, freshness, and vigor of youth.
What is dental occlusion? It sounds pretty “occluded,” right? Well, the truth is that it appears very esoteric to many dentists. So, don’t feel so bad if you do not understand the concepts of the human masticatory system.
What does it have to do with cosmetic dentistry? EVERYTHING... And this is why I am writing this blog post.
Everybody interested to get his or her smile rejuvenated needs to have at least an idea about what occlusion means. There is no aesthetic element in the human smile that doesn’t relate to a specific function. Anything beautiful, and for that matter also anything ugly, created by nature serves the purpose of survival.
I have given numerous lectures to cosmetic dentists in my professional life and I have always found it very rewarding to see the cognitions that people get when they start to understand how aesthetics is related to function.
Dr. Jörg-Peter Rabanus is currently San Francisco's only AACD-accredited cosmetic dentist. He has been teaching cosmetic dentistry and smile design for many years. He believes that it is not enough to deliver to his patients the best dentistry possible, but also to help other cosmetic dentists to attain that same level of expertise.
All of my patients have one thing in common when they meet with me for the first time: they want to look better, but it has to be natural.
A natural smile is not something that we invent or create. Yes, an artist “creates” his art, whether he uses his canvas or clay, he is free to communicate whatever he wants through his compositions. While he may choose realism or avant-garde as his preferred form of communication, his goal is to precipitate an emotional response within the observer.
While smiles also induce emotions, teeth are not a canvas. They only exist because nature created them to fulfill a functional purpose. The interpretation of a human smile is a post-evolutionary development that has been refined through thousands of years of social interaction. While their social effect has become more important than their original functional purposes, teeth are yet intimately connected to oral and masticatory function.