A smile has its own handwriting

No one can sign their name the same way twice. However careful you are, wherever the pen meets the paper there remains a slight tremor, a difference in slant. A smile is the same. In the line of the teeth, the curve of the lip, that fine crease at the corner of the eye, a person’s whole story lies hidden.

For twenty years, I have been reading a different handwriting every day. Some are written in haste; others have been caught on the same sentence for years. Now and then a patient hands me a photograph and says, “Give me this smile.” And yes, the smile in the photograph is beautiful. But it is someone else’s signature.

To design a smile is not to rewrite it from scratch; it is to make legible the sentence that was already there.

This is why I love the word bespoke. Before a tailor ever touches the cloth, he looks at the person in front of him: the set of the shoulders, the way they walk, which hand they open a door with. I, too, listen before I take any measurements. How you laugh; whether you raise a hand to cover your mouth when you do; when you last showed your teeth in a photograph.

Then I draw. On paper, in pencil. Digital simulations are, of course, part of our work; but paper has a patience all its own. Even the eraser marks have something to say.

Not perfect, but yours

Flawless symmetry is something nature rarely offers. Sometimes we deliberately leave a tooth turned a few degrees, because that slight tilt is in conversation with the rest of the face. The goal is not for you to see a stranger in the mirror, but to see yourself, just a little bolder.

Your smile is your handwriting. I simply refresh the ink.