But I was just an ordinary, balding 40-year-old man with aging yellow teeth. My family, friends and colleagues accepted them without a thought. Still, they chewed at me, my teeth did.

No, Sigmund, it had nothing to do with a fear of aging—I just plain never liked them. They had come to me crooked and yellow and were partially redeemed by an orthodontist when I was 14, but as time passed the color reminded me more and more of a husked cob of horse corn. Every attempt at improvement backfired. For years I brushed with the ferocity of two lumberjacks trying to saw a sequoia, causing little divots to develop under the gum line, which I self-consciously began to poke at with my fingernails. Bleach administered in specially fitted mouth guards did nothing to my choppers but did manage to burn the hell out of my gums. I tried to resign myself. But when I caught my father stuffing his pockets with chocolates to smuggle to my 2-year-old son, I heard myself howl, "would you please knock it off! I don't want his teeth to look like mine." You can imagine how quickly my neck swiveled when I heard about a dentist who could create the perfect smile. Cindy Crawford's dentist. Dr. Gregg Lituchy.

No, Cindy does not have porcelain veneers. She lives off her natural beauty. But if she trusted Lituchy to help keep her smile looking Vogue—well, hey, wasn't I GQ?

I entered the Manhattan office of Marc Lowenberg and Gregg Lituchy and was handed a