Meet the Snap-On Smile – a thin, flexible, resin shell of perfect teeth that snaps over your actual teeth like a retainer. No adhesive, no drilling.
Its inventor, Marc Liechtung, is a dentist at Manhattan Dental Arts, where you can walk in on a Monday, make a painless plaster mold of your teeth and then pick up your new smile by Friday. All for $1,200 to $1,600. Patients can work with a "smile guide" to chose one of 17 colors ("yellow-white," "yellow-gray," even "Extreme White Buyer Beware") and 18 shapes ("squared," "square-round," "pointy"). But many patients just hand Liechtung a celebrity photo and say, "Make my teeth look like this." So he does. But he wants to make one thing clear: "I did not come up with the Snap-On Smile so people could mimic celebrities."
His goal was an affordable, minimally invasive dental tool. "I had patients with almost no teeth who didn’t have $20,000 for reconstruction," he says. So this year, after months in the lab, he unveiled Snap-On Smiles. He is licensing them to dentists and has sold more than 300 to his own patients, many of whom have perfectly healthy (and often straight) teeth.
People don’t ask Liechtung whether the Snap-On causes permanent damage (it doesn’t) or whether you can eat with it (you can – even corn on the cob). "No," Liechtung says, "they just want to know: ‘Which is the most popular celebrity?’ ‘What kind of girls get Halle Berry?’ ‘Who do guys ask for?’
"In the beginning, it made me sick. I thought I invented some serious medical device, but all people wanted to do was use it to make themselves look like celebrities!" Eventually he thought, Well, why not? "A person comes in, I say I can give them any teeth they want, who are they going to want to look like? Me? No!"
Liechtung wears a Snap-On every day. But whose smile is it? "I just made an enhanced version of my own," he says. But people rarely believe him. "I hate to admit it," he says, "but when they persist, I tell them my teeth are Brad Pitt’s, because really, who wouldn’t want his teeth?"
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