I've always been a shy smiler, more inclined to wry, closelipped smirks and crinkly eye contact than full on dental wattage. Nothing was technically "wrong" with my teeth, but they were low-impact. Dr. Marc warned me that most people come in wanting Julia Roberts's smile, but not everyone can have it. Definitely, I agreed. I didn't want some bigger-than-life movie star smile, any more than I wanted Hollywood boobs. I wanted my own smile-only better. Fake teeth that didn't look fake. Dr. Marc called in his partner, Dr. Lituchy.

"Absolutely," Dr. Lituchy said, calling me an "excellent candidate for veneers," which are this pieces of porcelain bonded to the fronts of your teeth to make each one more uniform in shape and color. We were ready to move forward - unless my boyfriend, Rick, had his way. He was dead set against it. He said my teeth were an essential part of the girl he'd fallen in love with. I dragged him over to the mirror to point out my flaws; he whipped out snapshots of us in which my smiles seemed to gleam. When I told Dr. Marc about Rick's concerns, he gave me an assignment: to look through some magazines for smiles I liked. I found a picture of Kate Hudson, whose smile was irregular and childishly cute and probably real.

I showed the picture to Dr. Marc, who agreed that Kate was a good model, but he said he envisioned something more "glamorous" for me - his code for bigger and whiter.