How I fixed my dental disaster

The impact sounded dramatic, apparently. The day I passed out. Falling on my face on some medical equipment in daddy’s hospital room. Vanish. KAPOW! Muffled cries. My face was hot, palpably throbbing from the blow. I blinked. Mom was panting, Dad was still. Squinting my eyes, I timed my sister by crawling. “It’s okay?” she whispered, grabbing the front tooth that broke the fall, saving me from a serious head injury. Tongue swirl. Some blood. I felt the gap. And then the jagged edges of chipped fangs and molars went away like a razor-sharp mountain range.

I had just spent my honeymoon in Tanzania, returning to London, when I got the dreaded call that Daddy had had a stroke. I had jumped on a plane to California. A few minutes after my arrival, in the commotion, I lost consciousness.

Dental problems besieged me from the first sigh of adulthood. I chipped off both of my front fenders while snowboarding in college. For my UC Berkeley degree, I bought myself two front teeth. I called a hotline, 1-800-DENTIST, about my predicament. They recommended “capping” – simple, permanent, magnificent, touting a superior cosmetic benchmark. Slightly terrified, installed in the dentist’s chair, I wondered why he sawed my teeth. I remember lifting the hand mirror, anxious to inspect my chiseled temporaries: two oblong, bright yellow rabbit teeth protruding. Panic sucked me out of my body. He had shaved my teeth to the bumps, gifting me with metal crowns that emitted a gray haze across my gum line for graduation. Weeks of hiding my smile have turned into years. A new dentist suggested porcelain crowns. My gums were thankfully pink, but the teeth were now pewter in low light. I still saved to rectify this mess. And then the miserable incident in the hospital room happened.

I took a flight to Dubai, crazy woman traveling to see a dentist I found on Instagram

“We want to give you a Julia Roberts smile!” proclaimed the New York dentist. After some amateur work, I felt an exaggerated ease in the polished excavations of the Upper East Side. I succumbed to the inevitable: “prepare” the rest of my chompers for my A pretty woman makeover. A trying year saw me wear a temporary bridge to accommodate an implant. But a new nightmare unfolded: veneers of piano keys, too big for my face, were glowing at me this time. And not just two. A mouthful. Alarmingly, I couldn’t close my lips. Then my jaw started. By clicking. Painful. When dentists play god in your mouth, rather than following your existing bite, it can affect function. The ivory chiclets were so colossal, my bite so out of tune, that my teeth began to move. When the dentist recommended Invisalign, I was in despair.

I often wonder why the most common nightmares are about teeth. I can only attest that dental trauma is a cruelty far beyond vanity. I bonded with others who had been similarly abused. Quietly determined to find the master of revision dentistry, I booked consultations from London to Los Angeles. I remembered Hilary Duff being crucified in the press for getting horse veneers, which she made smaller, and I clung to a demented hope of finding the guy who fixed her teeth. I examined paparazzi photos of “Duff visiting a dentist in Burbank, Calif.”, Desperately to recognize the mall, to no avail. My best friend and dental confidant Chloë Sevigny (who also knocked herself out) asked her reps to contact Duff’s. They never responded.

Then the unthinkable happened: my implant got infected. Saved with laser surgery, it triggered more disfigurement – severe gum recession. I needed a miracle.

I’m not a social media enthusiast, but I am eternally grateful for Instagram and its creepy algorithm. Because that’s how I found Dr. Duval, the dentist who appeared in my diet, and the man who I believe is the best cosmetic dentist in the world. My eyes didn’t believe it at first. His photos were magical. Translucency, shapes, contours, angles, symmetry. Peerless. There was a giant capture: he was in Dubai.

With nearly 370,000 subscribers, Dr Duval uses Instagram as his main gateway to the world. The region’s sequins are loyal customers, but there is an air of mystery around the impenetrable dentist and his limited digital profile. Duval is his first name. Before dentistry, he studied architecture in his native Syria. When the civil war broke out, he moved his practice from Damascus to an elegant clinic on Jumeirah Beach in Dubai.

Still, my confidence in him surprised me. I sent x-rays and photos to the director of Dr. Duval’s office. Later, with my negative Covid test, I boarded a flight to Dubai, a crazy woman traveling alone to a country I had never been to before, with white fingers to be treated by a fantastic dentist that I had found Instagram. My friends thought I was crazy.

But this time it was different. I would wake up every morning, do yoga, take a dip in the warm sea, gorge myself on breakfast at the wonderful Mandarin Oriental, my home and shrine for two weeks, and walk 10 minutes to the clinic. Every day, I felt listened to. I surrendered. Years of trauma melted into the spa-like dental experience.

Dr. Duval is warm and free from the ego typical of some hifalutin dentists. He wears an iconic white NY Yankees cap, Moncler shirts, Gucci pants and designer sneakers, which he spins, sometimes on time. Like a sculptor, he said he could see the smile I must have. Surrounded by a stellar team that works tirelessly six days a week, his process is the pursuit of perfection. Other dentists prepare your teeth, take impressions and send them to a laboratory, internal or external; you come back for the try-on and are stuck with the results. Duval is different. With a needle-like focus, one day he worked on me for 10 hours until midnight. Another day, he and his on-site ceramist debated a .00001 mm gum-to-tooth margin for an entire afternoon. Sometimes you nail it down with the first set, sometimes it takes four, but it’s relentless until both artist / dentist and patient are fully satisfied with the results.

It still feels like a dream. The person who left Dubai, on the other hand, felt revitalized – in fact, a pretty woman. I walked through the hotel to catch my flight to New York, smiling from ear to ear.

Maryam L’Ange paid for her Smile Makeover, from $ 2,000 to $ 2,500 per tooth. Dr Duval Aloush, Villa 252, Jumeirah Road, Dubai (+ 9714-222 0222; [email protected]; @doctorduval)