Most people exercise daily because they care a lot about their physical fitness and health. But did you know that there are drills that you can do regularly to improve your smile? Facial exercises are as important as physical exercises and as effective as cosmetic facial surgeries. In this article, you will learn how to have a perfect smile through these 7 useful steps.
What Is a Perfect Smile?
An ideal smile is supposed to make you look and feel better about yourself. It also helps to alleviate stress and enables you to make a better first impression. Beauty experts define a perfect smile as a smile that doesn’t reveal more than 3 millimeters of the gums between the top of your front teeth and the bottom of your upper lip.
Also, the shape of the gums of your lower incisors and upper laterals should be a balanced half-oval or half-circular outline. However, it is important to understand that the principles of a perfect smile vary from one person to another because peoples’ facial and muscular considerations are not identical.
Importance of a Perfect Smile
It is no secret that a bright, beautiful smile creates a charming first impression. Your smile can help you to convey an assertive, optimistic, and welcoming personality, even without a word. An attractive smile will help you to lure people to you and compel them to respond positively to your requests.
Apart from improving your physical appearance, a perfect smile will also improve your personality, both psychologically and emotionally. When you are self-conscious or unhappy about the quality of your smile, your relationship with other people is negatively affected because you will always appear timid, withdrawn, or angry. You will also feel unwanted, unattractive, or insecure.
In a recent poll done by the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, over nine people out of ten adults admitted that they consider a perfect smile a social asset, while 85 percent of them agreed that an unattractive smile makes a person less appealing. Even more shocking is the fact that 74 percent of the respondents agreed that an imperfect smile can ruin someone’s career opportunities.
Sadly, many things can make your smile imperfect, including crooked teeth, missing teeth, discolored teeth, sagging facial skin, damaged facial structure, and many others. So, if you want to improve your smile, you need to know what prevents you from having a perfect smile, then improve on it.
Components of a Smile
To improve your smile, you have to learn how to apply certain rules and strategies. You also have to assess the condition of your teeth, lips, gum, skin, and other parts of your facial structure. Here are some of the main components of a perfect smile.
1. Lips
Your lips are the frame that sets out the shape and appearance of your smile, surrounding your teeth and gums. Therefore, if the shape of your lips is imperfect, you will have an imperfect smile. To improve your smile and keep your lips looking fuller, you should rectify the shape, fullness, and balance of your lips. If your facial features do not line up to your teeth and lip lines, your optimal facial esthetics will be affected.
2. Midline
For a perfect smile, your facial midline should be in the middle of your face. A facial midline is the starting point of a smile design. It is an imaginary vertical line drawn between the two front upper teeth. Some prominent facial features like nose, eyes, and chin can mislead you when you are trying to find a midline, especially if they are not properly aligned. Therefore, you should use other facial features like your eyebrows and Cupid bow to find your midlines.
3. Smile Line
A smile line is a line formed by the upper side of your lower lip. If your smile line is perfect, the ends of your upper teeth should match your lower lip and the bottom of your lower lip should follow the same line as the gums of your lower jaw.
4. Teeth
For your smile to be perfect, your teeth should be white, straight, evenly spaced, without gaps between them, unstained, not overcrowded, and properly aligned. Also, your upper teeth should show fully and be in good proportion to your gums when you smile. Gum contouring can also play a role in achieving that perfect smile by reshaping and balancing the gum line.
7 Useful Steps to Follow When Improving Your Smile
Even though there are no identical smiles, you can do several useful things to improve the quality of your smile.
1. Smiling Practice
Just like any other part of your body, your face contains muscles that need to be exercised regularly to stay in good shape. These muscles are important because they control your smile. By exercising these muscles, you will have better control over your facial expressions.
The good thing about practicing how to smile perfectly is that there are several simple exercises that you can perform every day. For instance, you can sit or stand in front of a mirror and stretch the corners of your mouth sideways while holding your lips together. Hold your mouth in this position for about ten seconds.
Then stretch the corners of your mouth further (horizontally) and open your lips to expose the edges of your teeth. Hold this position for about 10 seconds. Expose half of your teeth by stretching the corners of your mouth further sideways and hold this position for another 10 seconds.
Finally, expose all your teeth by smiling hard and wide. Hold this position for additional 10 seconds. Perform this exercise daily to improve your smile.
2. Smile Line Eraser
As you grow old, the skin around your mouth will develop fine lines commonly referred to as smile lines. The smile line eraser is a simple exercise that can help you to reduce these fine lines. It will also help you to look younger and give you a perfect, natural smile. Yoga enthusiasts refer to this exercise as the fish pose.
Start by squeezing your lips dramatically by rolling your lips out and sucking in your cheeks. Hold this pose and try to smile. Don’t release until you feel a mild aching sensation in your facial muscles. Although this exercise is highly effective, it should not be performed more than once a day because it can your facial muscles.
3. Silly Rabbit Exercise
This exercise helps to tone the muscles in your cheeks while enhancing the elasticity and control of your smile. Furthermore, you don’t have to stand in front of a mirror when performing this drill, especially if you always laugh at silly faces.
To perform this exercise, you need to smile wide and hard with your lips closed. Try as much as possible to achieve an ear-to-ear smile. While smiling, twist your nose like a rabbit until your cheek muscles connect with the grin. Hold this pose for about 5 seconds and then release. You can repeat this exercise 10 times a day.
4. Facelift Exercise
One of the most important facial muscles that prevent the skin around your mouth from sagging is quadratus labli superioris. This muscle helps to keep your face looking youthful and the skin around your mouth resilient. To perform this exercise, open your mouth slightly and relax your upper lip.
Then flare out your nostrils and fold your nose with an inflated motion. Pull up your upper lip and hold the pose for 10 seconds. Then release the pose slowly and repeat the process twice a day.
5. Wide Smile Technique
This smiling technique is relatively an integral part of your daily life because you will always find yourself smiling at some point. However, the idea here is to smile wide and hard and holding that smile for about 15 seconds. Release the smile slowly and repeat the process about 10 times.
This exercise not only causes your cheek muscles to stretch and strain but also leaves you feeling happier. Slowly, this will become a habit, smiling off at stressful situations. However, this exercise needs time and devotion.
6. Maintain Good Oral Health
As earlier mentioned, a perfect smile depends largely on the condition of your mouth. Thankfully, you can keep your mouth looking healthy by following simple oral health practices, such as brushing and flossing your teeth regularly, and avoiding unhealthy foods and practices like smoking and overconsumption of alcohol. Brushing and flossing your teeth daily helps to remove plaque that causes tooth decay.
Smoking and chewing tobacco will cause teeth discoloration, affecting the quality of your smile. You should also avoid sugary foods because they will expose your teeth to the risk of decay. If you are used to opening beer and soda bottles with your teeth, stop it immediately before you break your teeth and ruin your natural smile.
7. Cosmetic Surgery
If the abnormalities in your smile are natural, you can rectify them through cosmetic surgery. Fortunately, numerous cosmetic procedures can help you to improve the quality of your smile. For instance, if you have a missing tooth, you can replace it with a dental implant or denture to restore your smile.
And if your lips are too thin, they can be made fuller with dermal fillers. You can also undergo a facelift procedure to remove wrinkles and smile lines from your skin. This surgical procedure also helps to lift the sagging skin.
In Summary
Even though everybody wants to know how to have a perfect smile, it is important to understand that there is no one identical smile. Therefore, you should practice or seek medical help to find a smile that you like. That way, you will have enough confidence to smile at the world without feeling inadequate.
