A beautiful smile is your most important facial feature.

Gummy smile: When you smile too much gum tissue is exposed. Sometimes the teeth are also exposed even when you are not smiling. The ratio of lips - gums - teeth isn't balanced. Fortunately your gummy smile can easily be corrected by a gummy smile correction.

General practitioners: Surprisingly, the threshold for GPs was 4 mm, the most lenient of the study group. The important question is: When do we treat a gummy smile? When it bothers the patient. The ideal target is to get somewhere under 3mm for patients who desire to change their smiles. Before treatment, it’s necessary to understand exactly what causes a gummy smile. There are at least seven different causes, and if you don’t diagnose the cause correctly, you’re going to pick the wrong treatment for your patients.

The Seven Causes

  1. Short upper lip (if a patient has an extremely short upper lip it’s not going to cover gingiva and their upper teeth)
  2. Hypermobile lip (lip moves too much)
  3. Vertical maxillary excess VME (short ramus and overgrowth of maxilla)
  4. Anterior over-eruption (excess overbite)
  5. Wear and compensatory eruption
  6. Altered active eruption (the teeth don’t make it out of bone)
  7. Altered passive eruption (gingiva doesn’t recede as the person matures)

Three Traditional Methods for Treating a Gummy Smile

Orthodontics: Intrudes over erupted teeth and levels them to correct position so that it eliminates gingival display.

Periodontal surgery: Crown lengthening to move gingival levels apically, typically performed on short teeth.

Orthognathic surgery: Moves the maxilla in an apical direction impacting the maxilla.

For instances when these traditional methods of treatment won’t work, such as a patient has a hypermobile lip, there are a couple of non-traditional methods: 

Botox: Studies suggest Botox, when injected into the muscles of the upper lip can to be an effective method; however, the improvement is temporary and must be repeated every three to six months.

Lip repositioning surgery: Severs the muscles that elevate the lip so it can no longer rise as far in a smile. An irreversible solution diagnosis is the key to a successful outcome.