Ohio State Researchers Pursue the Perfect Smile: Findings Published
in JADA
November, 2008
College of Dentistry professors
Stephen Rosenstiel and
Henry Fields
have conducted a research study that was recently featured in the
prestigious Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA). A
premier, peer-reviewed publication that presents the best and most
significant research in dentistry, JADA’s articles feature research
that has a significant impact on the practice of clinical dentistry,
such as the esthetic smile research conducted by Drs. Rosenstiel and
Fields.
Dr. Fields, a former president of the Ohio Dental Association (ODA)
and the current chairman of the College of Dentistry’s Division of
Orthodontics, partnered with Dr. Rosenstiel, the chairman of
the Division of Restorative and Prosthetic Dentistry at OSU, to
conduct a groundbreaking study in esthetic smile
research.
Working with Ohio State orthodontics residents A.J. Ker and Richard
Chan, and Professor Emeritus Mike Beck, Drs. Rosenstiel and Fields
surveyed 243 individuals from Columbus (Ohio), Boston
(Massachusetts), and Seattle (Washington), using an innovative
survey method that allowed participants to view images of various
smiles, and to manipulate those images on a laptop screen to create
what they considered the “perfect” smile.
The results of the survey were published in a JADA article titled,
"Esthetic and Smile Characteristics from the Layperson's
Perspective: A Computer-Based Survey Study."
Commenting on this research, Fields said, “Dentists have
always known that crooked, crowded, and protruding teeth are
esthetically undesirable, but we’ve learned from this study that the
general population is more tolerant of certain flaws than we
expected -- and they’re slightly less tolerant of others.”
Rosenstiel agreed with that statement. “There are a lot of factors
to consider in creating an attractive smile,” he said, “but we
wanted to better quantify what it means to create the truly perfect
or most esthetically pleasing smile -- and we wanted to be highly
specific about this.”
Although esthetic smile research has been done for many decades,
what is new about this research is that Fields and Rosenstiel have
studied the factors that make up the perfect smile, and they can
pinpoint right down to the millimeter what survey participants considered attractive
or unattractive in an array of smile characteristics.
Some of the esthetic preferences expressed by certain groups of
survey respondents surprised Rosenstiel and Fields. For instance,
the Seattle, Washington, participants were more accepting of a broad
smile than those who were surveyed in Boston and Columbus.
When
asked about this variation in smile preference, Rosenstiel said,
“That finding was statistically insignificant, so we didn’t focus on
it, but we think the ‘Hollywood’ effect might account for that
preference.” He added, “When you see popular Hollywood celebrities
-- like Julia Roberts, for example -- you notice that her smile is
very broad, and that almost all of her teeth are visible when she smiles.
And yet
that smile is often described as being beautiful.”
Other preferences expressed by survey respondents included a small
amount of “buccal corridor,” which is the dark space that’s visible
at the edges of the mouth when people smile. Survey participants
preferred smiles with very little buccal corridor, and their ratings
showed that the amount they were willing to tolerate in an
esthetically pleasing smile was minimal.
Asked about the significance of this research and its impact on
patients and dentists, Fields and Rosenstiel agreed that these
findings will help clinicians to refine their treatment methods so
their patients can get a smile they consider to be truly
beautiful.
Fields said in closing, “When you examine people’s smiles as minutely
as we’ve done in this study, you can make them overly sensitive
about the way they look -- but if we apply this
research in a smart way, it can help us determine which treatments
will give our patients the closest approximation of a perfect
smile.”
