I’m Isabelle. I’m forty-one and I live in Reading. I like to laugh. For years my hand went up the moment a real one came. The teeth had gone crooked and different colours. In close photographs I never showed them. I envied people who laughed without thinking.
I knew the way out was veneers — a smile design. I ran from the chair for years. What if they look like bathroom tiles, white and huge? What if they file mine down to cat stumps? What if it rots underneath and my breath smells for life? Then I got the quotes here. Both were a fortune. So I started reading about Turkey. Some of it was women who finally showed their teeth. Some of it was purple gums, a whistle on every S, a veneer in a restaurant plate. One night I wanted a straight answer to is a smile design in Turkey safe? Not how many teeth. Is it safe.
The hand over my mouth
That search is how I found the clinic. I wanted a clinic name next to a dentist’s name, so I looked for Just Clinic Istanbul smile design. My first message didn’t ask for a number. I sent the tiles, the filing, the smell, the whistle. The reply went through every one before anybody mentioned a price. If you landed here looking for smile design Just Clinic Istanbul, this is what actually happened — not a gallery.
The photograph I could not unsee: opaque, thick, shouting white, no light through them, a size that didn’t belong to the face. I wanted to laugh. I did not want people asking where I had them done from across a room.
On the video call I said it straight. That look, he said, is one-size porcelain that ignores skin, lips and the white of your eye. They would use a thin, translucent material — E-max, in my case — matched to my skin, with more translucency towards the edges, the way real enamel behaves. When they went on, they were bright. They were not a bathroom wall. They do not shout. They look like teeth.
Not cat stumps
I’d seen the before-photos of prepared teeth: tiny pegs. Wrecking healthy enamel for a fashion was what kept me out of the chair.
They did not file mine down to cat stumps. A fraction of a millimetre off the front, and on one tooth nothing at all. The old thick crowns needed more. “We treat your own tooth as something to keep,” he said. Mine were not reduced to needles. I did not live with that shooting pain afterwards.
Forums are full of women with a beautiful smile they cannot stand close to anyone because of the smell. Food under the edge. Decay you cannot see. He said that is a gap at the margin — a millimetre the cement never sealed. They scan the mouth digitally, so the veneer fits like a puzzle piece, and they bond it so there isn’t a ledge. Months on, my gums are not red, not sore, and there is no smell. I can talk at a table without that old panic.
Talking in temporaries
It sounds petty until you do a job that involves talking. Teeth made too long or too thick, so the S and the F whistled, and the tongue hit a wall.
They put temporaries on and we talked. If a letter caught, the lab would change the permanent set by those millimetres. When the finals went on I did not whistle. My S is my S. I did not have to relearn how to speak.
Metal showing at the gum. A veneer in a restaurant. Those two pictures did the rounds at night. The purple line is old metal-backed porcelain. E-max and zirconia have no metal in them; the gum does not have that to reject. As for the apple: the bond, done properly, is stronger than the habit of not biting. I have bitten. Nothing has come off. I am not cracking walnut shells with them, and I was not asked to.
About six nights
I’d pictured a week of injections, a mouth propped open for hours, living on soup in a hotel room. It was not like that. I was in Istanbul about six nights. I went to the clinic on three of those days, a few hours, numb. I did not feel the drilling as pain. The scans took minutes — no tray of dreadful paste. The other days I walked about in temporaries, drinking tea. The permanents went on the last day and a car took me to the airport. Nobody booked me a second trip for implants. I did not have implants.
You’d be soft not to ask why it costs less. When I sat down and properly read around smile design Turkey, I stopped comparing “how many teeth” specials and asked what the material actually was, who was cutting, and who would answer if a margin failed at home. Two places sent a Hollywood gallery. One sent a plan for my mouth. I sat in a proper clinic. I paid less than I’d have paid in Reading. I did not pay less for tiles.
Ten o’clock in Reading
Me with a chip, or a gum that looks wrong, and a WhatsApp with two grey ticks that never turn blue. Didn’t happen. The same woman who answered my first message was still answering months later. I sent a photograph of a gum edge at about ten at night in week three. She came back later that night after showing the dentist. She was also blunt about what not to wait on. Spreading swelling, a fever, a veneer that actually moves — dentist here first, then her.
I’d never been to Istanbul. I don’t have a word of Turkish. I kept picturing the wrong bit of the airport with a numb mouth. I came through arrivals and there was a man holding a board with my name on it. After that a clinic car for every journey.
A dentist’s chair is a bad place not to understand what is being cut. The woman from the clinic spoke English and she was there while I signed, line by line. The mock-up and the check on the letters — that was the dentist. When the finals went on, the first thing I heard was my name and that it had gone well.
I’d read that once you’re numb they add implants, or whitening, or another six teeth. I had a number we had agreed. They stayed inside it. No extras on the day. No surprise on the invoice.
The woman in Bristol
I wanted someone who had sat in that chair with temporaries in, not a caption. I asked on the first call. They put me in touch with a woman in Bristol who’d had hers a year before. I asked about the tiles, the filing, the S. She was blunt. The temporaries feel odd for two days. Then she said: “I laugh in photographs now. That was the whole point.”
That is what booked me.
It’s a year on. I laugh with my teeth in view. They look like mine, only even. Millimetres, three clinic visits, and people who answered the phone when I was back in Reading. I don’t cover my mouth any more. That is a small sentence. It took me years to get to it.
