It took her a few seconds to understand what the dentist was really offering: confidence.
Once she did, she had just one question: “When can you start?”
“My adult teeth grew in noticeably yellowish gray.
It made me increasingly self-conscious,” Comer says.
Fast-forward about 20 years.
“This dentist was the first to say something could be done.
Comer’s dentist said the roughly $2,000 procedure was no big deal.
“I was so excited, I didn’t second-guess him,” she says.
She returned the next week for the procedure.
Then he handed her a mirror.
“I was … underwhelmed.
While eating or brushing, she’d suddenly feel a piece of porcelain floating around in her mouth.
“They were like those drugstore press-on nails.
When they popped off, it wasn’t painful, but it looked unattractive.
You could see the old, dark stained teeth underneath,” she says.
To top it off, the square shape looked a lot like Chiclets.
“I didn’t think it was possible for my teeth to look worse, but they did.
“I blamed myself for not doing more research before I let someone destroy my teeth.”
The anxiety was draining.
“He made it seem like this was bound to happen from time to time.
And each time, he charged me several hundred dollars,” Comer says.
Embarrassed and spending beyond her budgetit was a lot to pay on a teacher’s salaryComer felt totally helpless.
Sixty percent of customers are women, about half of whom are younger than 40.
Part of the appeal is that tooth jobs seem like simple procedures with immediate beautifying results.
Unlike plastic surgery, there’s no trip to the hospital and typically no painful recovery.
What are a few extra hours in the dentist’s chair if they yield a red-carpet smile?
But there’s not always a happy Hollywood ending.
(He denies all the allegations.)
And the work can be irreversibly bad in inexperienced hands.
Finding Dr.
Right
Too often, though, the consumer is swayed not by credentials but cost and lack of information.
Within weeks, her left front tooth was gray.
“It was so ugly; I avoided smiling.”
“So I got prepped: First a root canal on the damaged tooth.
“From the moment I saw them, I thought, I amnotwearing those,” she says.
“They looked totally fake and had a completely different shape than my original teeth.
I asked if he could redo them, make them look more natural.”
But his second try was no better.
They kept coming unstuck or breaking off, sometimes in chunks.
Desperate for a solution, Russell had searched the AACD website and found a local, accredited cosmetic dentist.
“I knew she was highly qualified, but I was still terrified.
I was scarred by what I had been through,” Russell says.
I asked her to walk me through every step of the process.”
“It was like a miracle: I suddenly had healthy, normal teeth,” Russell says.
“You have no idea how much your smile counts toward having confidence or having none.
It has just been amazing.”
“Some of my redo patients are emotional and angry; they feel like victims,” she says.
Work like that gives cosmetic dentistry a bad name.
It should be a wonderful experience and transformation, not a stressful, heartbreaking event.”
This time, her dentists were husband-and-wife team Colleen and Jason Olitsky.
After checking their AACD credentials, references and work examples, Comer felt confident enough to move forward.
“I’m grinning for pictures for the first time in years.”
Additional reporting by Jacquelyn Simone
