Today with the use of cell phone cameras, photography has taken on a whole new significance in many people’s lives. I am repeatedly amazed when observing people focusing on the quality of their photos by zooming in on the smallest details, usually resulting in a re-take once the slightest flaw is perceived.
This issue has also become a real challenge in dentistry. The high quality of our dental cameras and the macro/micro photos have altered our interpretation of what we perceive our teeth should look like and that can pose concerns for our work.
Macro is typically defined as the focus of capturing small but visible subjects and objects (ie, insects, flowers, etc.), while micro is defined as subjects that are invisible to the naked eye, such as microscopic cells, etc. These definitions are perhaps inconsistent within our field where the term “macro” in dentistry usually refers to the face and the facial features, while the term “micro” more often refers to details concerning individual teeth, or the teeth and the lips.
This intense hyper-focus can often lead to some daunting new challenges. Micro-observation of our patients’ teeth is not always beneficial as this intense close-up usually demonstrates high chromas, value shifts, translucency, and surface topography, as well as irregular shapes and angles contralaterally. This “zoomed in” look has us trying to remove all the attributes that make teeth look like teeth.
Conversely, when we “zoom out,” the natural teeth appear brighter against the lips and the patient’s skin tone, and those micro-irregularities fit the form of the face esthetically. Seeing teeth as large blown-up single elements without the full face distorts our view and alters our esthetic perception.
As termed by Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the “gestalt” is defined as the “whole” and how our brain perceives patterns and shapes, and must include facial form, skin tone, lip posture, and tissue harmony. The core idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, meaning that we do not see individual elements but rather a meaningful and organized complete structure.
Learning from this, in order to better evaluate our work, we need to step back and observe our patients from afar, treating the face as our own “gestalt” in the desire to create a more promising esthetic and complementary result.
