Dr. Galip Gürel about the correlation between the smile and the personality

Dr. Galip Gürel about reflecting the personality into the smile and the Visagism concept. The article was published together with the abstract “A to Z of Porcelain Laminate Veneers” by Gürel in the web site of the Swedish Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.

Healthy teeth and nice smile has always been a positive impression, someone reflects or gives to people.

When someone first meets a person, first thing he/she gets into contact is the eye, than after a few seconds their teeth hence the smile.

Aesthetics and Smile design had always been a great topic in the dental world.

However, the final esthetic results may fail to meet the patient’s expectations due to disharmony between the smile design and the patient’s personality. The patient may feel that the restored teeth do not really “belong” to him or her. Without the proper knowledge, the origin of this disharmony can be difficult to identify.

For decades, dental clinicians have sought to harmonize the shapes of the teeth with the entire face based on parameters such as gender, personality, and age; however, truly successful results have been elusive.

The aim of this lecture is to present a novel concept: Visagism that was developed by artist Philip Hallawell and involves the creation of a customized personal image expressing a person’s sense of identity. The Visagism concept helps dental clinicians provide restorations that account not only for esthetics, but also for the psychosocial features of the created image, which affect patients’ emotions, sense of identity, behavior, and self-esteem. These factors, in turn, affect how observers react to patients following treatment.

It goes all the way back to Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) (who was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology) and his widely accepted studies about the ”symbols” – that talks the same language – for the majority of the people around the world, regardless their geographic locations, cultures, religions, lifestyles etc.

Morphophyschology that was developed by Louis Corman (1901–1995), a French psychiatrist, is a field of alternative science that proposes a correspondence between human facial morphology (the shape and configuration of the face) and individual personality.

The combination of these concepts and their interpretation to dentistry is the main frame of this new smile design application.

It is about reading the human facial morphology, and interviewing the patient, get to know their true self-beings, find out the strengths of their characters, and reflecting these emotions true their smiles.

The patients major characteristic findings are identified, and then materialized and reflected to the new smile design.

And in order to built up this design, just as Jung described half a decade ago, the universally accepted symbols are taken as the reference, and used by us when deciding the basic tooth shape, the line angles of the teeth, and their alignment, including the incisal silhouette configuration.

In the clinical application of this novel concept, we make use of a combination of the facial outlines, the proportions of some basic areas of the face, and the patient’s major character reflections.

This lecture will focus on, reading the major areas of the face, defining the 4 major characters of human beings, their relation with the basic facial features, and how to transfer this data in our daily smile designs.

It will be about our findings and 8 years of experience over 700 cases that had been successfully treated with this concept.

Read more here: http://sacd.se/dr-galip-gurel/

Source:  SACD – Swedish Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (http://sacd.se/)