You may not be a dentist, but you know perfect teeth when you see them. As more and more people (famous or not) suddenly have perfect smiles, social media has become fixated on ‘good teeth’. Central to the discussion are veneers—thin coverings for teeth, often made of porcelain. A distinctive status symbol, veneers represent a market projected to reach $4.6 billion. Bad veneers—teeth that are too straight, too white, too Chiclet-shaped—are like T-shirts emblazoned with logos: They’re tacky. Good veneers—teeth that show distinction and restraint in color, shape, and straightness—are like a Loro Piana cashmere sweater: It’s quiet luxury.
Decisively in the “good veneer” column are dentist patients Michael Apa. Clients of his sought-after dental practice, Apa Aesthetic—now with four airy, comfortable locations—include the Jenner sisters, Chloë Sevigny and the Olsen twins. (Publicity-shy patients can use a back entrance and a private floor.) Apa has over 600,000 followers on Instagram. He wears Brunello Cucinelli from head to toe. He collects Ferraris. Consider him the Tom Brady of teeth.
Apa decided he wanted to be a dentist at the age of five. “I remember growing up a little insecure, a little overweight,” she says. “The one thing people always complimented me on was my smile. I got it, I got it [later in life] that all this positive reinforcement towards my smile and my teeth gave me such confidence in areas I didn’t really have.’ He pursued his dream relentlessly by shadowing his local dentist and pursuing a connection with Larry Rosenthal, DDS, one of the most well-known cosmetic dentists at the time (Rosenthal now works at Apa’s practice in New York). Today, Apa can make it look like you’ve had subtle work done to your face, even when you haven’t. If you’ve always wanted lip fillers, Apa can bend and lengthen your front teeth ever so slightly to give the illusion of larger lips. If you’ve always wanted oral fat removal, Apa can tilt your teeth slightly inward to create more hollow cheeks. And if you’ve always wanted cheek fillers, Apa can ‘blow out’ your smile by expanding the sides with just a touch to create more volume and a bigger smile. “He’s so talented at his craft,” says Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model and actor Brooks Nader. “He gave me a crazy smile. I like to smile in general, so he tuned it up a bit.’
Good veneers can also subtly communicate youth, says Apa. Teeth serve as the support system for the lower third of your face and begin to wear down over time. Smiles may become smaller, jaws weaker. Veneers can help strengthen your facial structure. As people age, teeth also become discolored. Apa can tell the difference between shades of white better than an interior designer picking out paint swatches. Even if a patient wants a high-powered movie star smile, Apa Aesthetics ceramists will layer multiple shades of porcelain, combining levels of opacity to make teeth appear bright white, but in a multi-faceted, natural way.
With veneers exploding in popularity, Apa has become something of a fixture. “In 2010, let’s say, [fixing bad veneers] it made up 10 percent of my practice,” says Apa. “Now it’s 60 to 70 percent.” Apa believes social media and more dentists cutting back on turnover to keep prices down may have caused this rise. Whether he’s making bad veneers or starting from scratch, a smile redesign with Apa costs $5,000 per tooth and has a 10-tooth minimum. The key to his customized approach is fitting each patient with a series of temporaries to get them used to their new smile. After making any adjustments at a next-day appointment, patients wear the temps for two weeks before he replaces them with hand-painted porcelain. This trial period gives patients the space to process their mouths in real time. “The number one failure of any cosmetic procedure is expectations,” says Apa.
Cosmetic dentistry is not yet a properly recognized specialty in the dental field. Ryan St. Germain, the executive director of development and alumni relations at the NYU College of Dentistry, likens it to wagyu beef — currently, anyone with a dental degree can call themselves a cosmetic dentist. Apa is partnering with NYU, his alma mater, to expand educational opportunities in cosmetic dentistry: He has invested in a new clinical space called NYU Apa Aesthetic Suite (scheduled to open this fall). It also supports the Apa Advanced Clinical Fellowship in Aesthetic Dentistry and the newly renamed Apa Honors Program in Aesthetic Dentistry, which allows students to formally specialize in cosmetic dentistry, such as veneers. He and St. Germain hope that NYU’s program can help legitimize cosmetic dentistry as a specialty in the dental industry, in turn increasing the care patients can receive from cosmetic dentists. “It’s an accelerator in every way,” says St. Germain.
“His name has a lot of value,” says Adam Doyno, director of development at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy Foundation, who has worked on the Dr. Michael Apa on Population Oral Health. This scholarship fund provides postgraduate level scholarships in population oral health.
Apa’s longevity in the game, at 21 years of coaching, also makes him a Brady. But he still finds meaning in the project, an opportunity to give patients the same confidence he found in good teeth. “I’ve met a lot of people who, whenever they talk, their hand goes immediately in front of their mouth — or when they smile, you can see their lips quiver because they’re so trained not to show their teeth,” he says. “It’s one of those things that if it bothers you, it’s going to get in the way of so many different parts of your life. To be able to pull it off in three hours and produce something that looks real…that’s a superpower. I really feel that way.”
A version of this story appears in the August 2024 issue of ELLE.
Katie Berohn is the Beauty Assistant at Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day and Prevention magazines, all members of the Hearst Lifestyle Group. She graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a major in journalism and a minor in technology, arts and media, and earned her master’s degree from NYU’s Graduate Program in Journalism. In addition, Katie has held internships at Denver Life Magazine, Yoga Journal, and Cosmopolitan, a digital editorial internship at New York Magazine’s The Cut, a social good fellowship at Mashable, and has freelanced for HelloGiggles. _When she’s not obsessing over the latest skincare launch or continuing her never-ending search for the perfect shade of red nail polish, Katie can be found in a hot yoga class, trying everything on the menu at New York’s newest restaurant, or hanging out in a trendy wine bar with her friends.
