WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN A HOLLYWOOD SMILE PACKAGE?

Look at how these packages are priced on the booking platforms, in their own words:

• 20 zirconia crowns for around $5,500

• 24 crowns with gum treatment for $6,990

• "Each additional crown beyond 20 costs about $200"

Read the unit. The product is crowns, priced per crown, sold in blocks of twenty — and the word "veneer" is often used for the same item in the same sentence.

A veneer is a thin facing on the front of the tooth. A crown covers the whole tooth, all the way round. The difference is how much of your own tooth is cut away:

Tooth structure removed

Veneerup to 30%

Full ceramic crown (front tooth)62–73%

(Kelleher, British Dental Journal, 2012)

Two-thirds of a healthy front tooth is a large, permanent thing to give up. It does not grow back, and no guarantee anywhere replaces it.

That is the transaction inside the phrase "Hollywood Smile". Whether it is the right transaction for you is a clinical question — which is why it cannot be answered by a package size.

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HOW MANY TEETH DOES A HOLLYWOOD SMILE NEED?

There is no clinical literature that supports 20 teeth, or 28, or 32. We looked for it. It does not exist.

Those numbers track price tiers, not anatomy. The platforms say so themselves when they charge "$200 per additional crown" — that is a pricing rule, not a diagnosis.

What the literature does give us is how many teeth actually show. In a published smile analysis of 157 people, teeth were visible back to the first premolars in 35.7% of subjects, and the number of teeth on display differed significantly between men and women (BDJ Open, 2020). A separate 2023 study found that the ideal width of your smile is defined relative to your own eye spacing, not a fixed figure.

And here is the part that argues directly against big numbers: a 2025 study of 180 observers found that width disproportion matters progressively less as you move from the central incisor toward the canine. The aesthetic return per tooth falls the further back you go.

The same study found something worth knowing before anyone sells you a full-arch case: a midline deviation of up to 2 mm was not noticeable to laypeople or to dentists. The flaws patients come in worrying about are often not the flaws that affect how a smile reads.

So the honest answer to "how many teeth" is: as many as are visible in your smile and have something actually wrong with them. Usually that is fewer than twenty. Sometimes it is four.

A clinic that fixes the number before the examination has reversed the order of the diagnosis.

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LET'S TALK ABOUT "TURKEY TEETH" PROPERLY

You have seen the coverage. We are not going to pretend it does not exist, and we are not going to tell you it is all unfair — because some of it is not.

Here is what the evidence actually says, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.

What British dentists report. The British Dental Association surveyed 1,000 UK dentists in 2022. 86% had treated patients with problems following overseas treatment. The treatment most likely to need follow-up was crowns, at 87%. On cost of repair: 65% reported over £500, 51% over £1,000, and 20% over £5,000. More than 40% of that remedial work was carried out on the NHS.

We publish that on our own treatment page because you are going to find it anyway, and because a clinic that has read it should be easier to trust than one that has not.

What that survey does not say. It is a survey of dentists' experience, not a study of patient outcomes. It tells you how many dentists see problems. It does not tell you what proportion of patients have them. Those are different questions, and the difference matters.

And the number nobody can source. You will see figures quoted for what percentage of "Turkey teeth" cases fail. We went looking for the study behind them. There is no case series, no cohort study and no registry. Any specific failure percentage you are shown for Turkish dentistry is unsourced — including any we might be tempted to quote at you.

What the peer-reviewed analysis of the coverage found. In 2025 the British Dental Journal published a framework analysis of 131 UK newspaper articles about dental tourism. Its findings:

• 92.4% of the coverage appeared in tabloids; 80.9% in The Sun or Daily Mail titles.

• The authors describe the way "Turkey teeth" has come to stand for all overseas dentistry as "unfair and inappropriate."

• The coverage failed to distinguish cosmetic dental tourism from people travelling simply because they could not get an NHS appointment.

• The authors state that no objective evidence demonstrates that overseas care produces worse outcomes than domestic treatment.

That is not a Turkish clinic defending itself. That is the British dental profession's own journal.

So what is the real problem? The same literature answers it. The UK dentists quoted in that coverage were unanimous in recommending the least destructive option first — whitening, bonding, orthodontics — over cutting teeth down for crowns.

The problem is not the country. It is selling twenty crowns to a mouth that needed eight veneers, or whitening, or nothing at all. That happens in Istanbul. It also happens on Harley Street. It happens wherever the package is decided before the examination.

 

WHAT HAPPENS TO A HEALTHY TOOTH WHEN YOU CROWN IT

This is the part of the conversation that package pricing is designed to skip.

A crown on a front tooth removes 62–73% of the tooth (Kelleher, BDJ 2012). 
Crowns that are not placed by a specialist or are not executed properly can subsequently lead to pain, bad breath smell, or dislodgement. Although these issues can be resolved with a revision procedure, they significantly compromise patient comfort.

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THE "GOLDEN RATIO" YOUR SMILE DESIGN IS BASED ON DOES NOT EXIST

Almost every clinic offering smile design says it designs to the golden proportion — the 62% ratio.

A study at the University of Birmingham School of Dentistry measured the front teeth of 509 people in the UK. The findings:

• The Golden Proportion "existed in a very limited number of the sample"

• The RED Proportion did not exist in the sample at all

• Preston's Proportion had "too wide a distribution to be of relevant use"

(Kalia, British Dental Journal, 2020)

A systematic review of 52 studies across global populations reached the same conclusion: the golden proportion is not found consistently anywhere, appearing in under 20% of natural dentitions in several populations, and varying by geography and ancestry (Applied Sciences, 2022).

What the Birmingham data did support was a modified golden percentage: central incisor 22.5%, lateral 15%, canine 12.5% of the visible anterior width. That is a useful reference. It is not a law of beauty, and it does not describe your face.

So when a clinic shows you a smile overlaid with golden-ratio lines, you are looking at a design heuristic from the 1980s presented as biology. We design to your lip line, your tooth display and your face — and we will show you the photographs we measured it from.

 

WHY YOU WILL WALK OUT WHITER THAN YOU INTENDED

This is our favourite piece of evidence on this page, because it explains something no clinic will tell you about its own sales process.

A randomised controlled trial published in the Journal of Prosthodontics (2026) took 210 patients seeking aesthetic treatment and changed one thing only: the order in which the shade tabs were shown.

• Shown natural shades first, then bleached shades: 84.3% chose a bleached shade

• Shown bleached shades first, then natural: 31.4%

• Same patients. Same tabs. A 53 percentage point difference from sequence alone.

• Patients in the first group changed their mind between first impression and final choice 31.4% of the time. In the second group, 1.4%.

• And patients with greater psychosocial concern about their appearance chose significantly lighter shades (p<0.001).

Read that last line again. The patients most easily pushed toward an unnatural shade are the ones most anxious about their teeth — which is to say, the patients who walked in most vulnerable.

Our protocol, because of that study: we show you the full shade range at once, with a confirmation step, which is the presentation method that produced the smallest disagreement between what the patient wanted and what the clinician recorded in that trial. We do not lead with the bleach tabs.

If you still want the brightest shade after seeing the whole range twice, that is your decision and we will make it well. But it will be your decision.

 

WHAT WE DO INSTEAD OF SELLING YOU A PACKAGE

We examine first, and the plan comes from the examination. Photographs and X-rays reviewed before you book a flight. A written plan, tooth by tooth, naming which teeth get what and why.

We look inside the tooth before we prepare it. Some of the teeth in a smile makeover plan turn out to have decay or infection inside them, and those teeth need root canal treatment before a crown goes on. If we find one, we tell you what it adds in days and in cost, and we change the plan. We do not crown over an infected tooth to finish inside your travel dates — because the crown comes off again when the pain starts. [ Root canal treatment before a crown → ]

We start from the least destructive option that solves your case. Whitening, then composite bonding, then veneers, then crowns — in that order, and we stop at the first one that works. That order is not our house style; it is what the UK dentists quoted in the BDJ's 2025 review unanimously recommended.

Whitening is worth being accurate about too: the Cochrane review of 71 trials rates the evidence for home whitening as low certainty, with sensitivity and irritation as the usual side effects — "typically mild and transient". That is a modest treatment with a modest risk profile. It is a categorically different proposition from removing two-thirds of a tooth, and that asymmetry, not a claim of superiority, is the argument.

We use a trial smile — for the drill, not for the sales pitch. In a 12-year study of 66 patients and 580 veneers, using an additive mock-up to guide preparation kept 80% of preparations inside enamel, and where the preparation stayed in enamel the debonding failure rate was 0% (Gürel et al., 2012). Enamel is what the ceramic bonds to. Staying inside it is the single most important thing your dentist can do for the twenty years after you fly home.

We will tell you when the answer is "fewer". If four teeth show when you smile, we are not treating ten. If your gums are the problem rather than your teeth — and at 4 mm of gum display, around 90% of both dentists and laypeople rate a smile least attractive (Scientific Reports, 2023) — then gum contouring may fix it without touching a tooth at all.

We will also tell you when the answer is "not us". Significant crowding is an orthodontic problem. Correcting it with ceramic means cutting teeth to compensate for their position, and the honest recommendation is aligners or braces first. We would rather lose the case than give you that.

 

HOW LONG WILL IT LAST? THE ANSWER NOBODY GIVES YOU STRAIGHT

You will see "lifetime" and "permanent" on other pages. Here is what the published data says.

Veneers, pooled across 29 studies at about 10 years:

MaterialSurvivalTechnical complicationsAestheticBiological

Feldspathic ceramic96.13%41.48%19.64%6.51%

Leucite-reinforced93.70%29.87%17.89%4.4%

Lithium disilicate (e.max)96.81%6.1%1.9%0.45%

(Klein et al., Journal of Esthetic and Restorative Dentistry, 2024)

Now read those two columns together, because this is the sentence that matters most on this page:

"Survival" in this literature means the restoration is still in your mouth. It does not mean nothing happened to it. Feldspathic veneers "survive" at 96% while carrying a 41% technical complication rate over the same decade. Another analysis found that only 53% of porcelain veneers had needed no re-intervention at all by ten years (Kelleher, BDJ 2012).

Crowns, for context: tooth-supported single crowns survive at 93.3% (all-ceramic) and 95.6% (metal-ceramic) at five years (Pjetursson et al., 2007). If you are shown crown survival figures of 98% or higher, check whether they are for implant-supported crowns — those are a different restoration and the figures are routinely misquoted.

Zirconia veneers: the pooled data shows 100% survival and no complications — at an average follow-up of 2.6 years. The authors of that analysis explicitly call for long-term data. We place them where they are indicated. We are not going to present under three years of follow-up as proof of anything.

Gum margins move. Recession at crown margins measures 0.3–0.6 mm at five years for a chamfer margin and often over 0.5 mm long term for a shoulder margin (Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2025). Over twenty years that is the mechanism by which a margin becomes a visible line at the gum. It is also why aesthetic crowns create a genuine conflict: hiding the join wants a margin under the gum, and gum health wants it above.

And what we cannot tell you. There is no published figure for how often a full-arch aesthetic case needs complete replacement, no study of what it costs over thirty years, and no cohort following what happens to the teeth underneath across successive replacements. Every replacement removes a little more tooth — that is mechanically certain and has never been measured.

No clinic can honestly quote you a thirty-year number. Including this one. Anyone who does is guessing.

 

WHO LOOKS AFTER YOU WHEN YOU GET HOME?

This is the strongest argument British and Irish dentists make against treatment abroad, and they are right to make it. Their point, in their words, is that dentists at home will not take on a case another dentist started — so if something goes wrong you have to fly back.

It is the one objection no clinic in Turkey answers. Here is our answer, and we have written down exactly where it stops.

We work with [N] partner dental clinics: [ŞEHİR 1], [ŞEHİR 2], [ŞEHİR 3], [ŞEHİR 4], [ŞEHİR 5], [ŞEHİR 6]. They are marked on the map below. We list the cities rather than just the number, because a number is a claim and a city is something you can check.

What happens if a problem arises after you fly home:

1. You contact us first, through the official channels on this site.

2. We arrange a diagnosis. If we have a partner dentist or clinic in your region, we refer you there — for examination and X-rays only — and they report their findings to us, so what happens next is decided on evidence rather than on a photograph you took with your phone. If we do not have a partner in your region, you describe the problem and its history to us directly, send photographs, and our dentists in Istanbul review it.

3. If the problem is covered by your guarantee — that is, if it arises from treatment we performed — we invite you to Istanbul and carry out the revision free of charge: the dentist's work, the materials and the laboratory work.

What the partner clinics do not do: they do not carry out your treatment. They are not our branches, they are not your new dentist, and they do not take your case over. Their job is to find out what is wrong, quickly and close to home, and to tell us.

That is deliberate. The clinic that placed the work is the clinic that should be correcting it — and we would rather fly you back to the team that knows your case than hand it to someone reading your file for the first time.

Alongside that:

A 5-year written guarantee, issued as a signed document in your name with your passport number, on the day treatment begins. Not a verbal promise, not a web page. A document you leave Istanbul holding.

A named clinician and a written, tooth-by-tooth record, so any dentist anywhere — ours, our partner's, or your own — can see exactly what was done to which tooth, with what material.

A guarantee is only as strong as the document behind it.

[ Read Our Guarantee Policy → ]

 

AND WHY INSIDE A HOSPITAL?

Our dental unit is a registered medical unit of Özel Florya Hospital — a full general hospital with a 24-hour emergency department, intensive care, and consultants across the general specialties in the building.

That matters most for two groups of patients.

If you are managing a chronic condition — heart disease, high blood pressure, a respiratory condition, diabetes, or oncology follow-up — you are the patient most clinics quietly prefer to decline. Florya can take you.

If you are frightened of the dentist, sedation is available to any patient who needs it, with an anaesthetist and an intensive care unit in the same building. If fear is the reason you have put this off for years, that is a different proposition from sedation in a high-street clinic.

Choose your clinic for what it can do if something goes wrong — not for what it charges.

[ Dental treatment when you have a medical condition → ]

 

QUESTIONS PATIENTS ASK

So do you do Hollywood Smile or not? We do the treatments people mean by it — veneers, crowns, bonding, whitening, gum contouring — planned from your examination rather than sold as a block of twenty. If you came here wanting a set number of teeth done, we will probably suggest a smaller plan, and we will show you why on your own photographs.

 

Is a Hollywood Smile crowns or veneers? In most packages sold by unit count, it is crowns. Ask the clinic to write down which one is planned for each tooth before you pay a deposit. If they will not put it in writing, that is your answer.

 

Can I get one without my teeth being filed down? Sometimes, depending on the position and condition of your teeth. Where the case allows it, a no-prep veneer leaves 95–100% of your enamel intact. Where it does not, we will tell you rather than pretend.

 

What if one of my teeth turns out to need a root canal? Then it has one before the crown goes on, and we tell you what that adds in days and in cost before we prepare anything. A crown covers the outside of a tooth and does nothing to the inside, so crowning over an infected tooth means the crown has to be cut off later.

 

How many days will I need in Istanbul? 4 to 6 days for veneers, 5 to 7 for crowns, 2 to 3 for composite bonding. If your natural teeth need whitening first, that has to be a separate stage — bond strength drops sharply for about two weeks after bleaching, so we will not compress both into one trip to make the schedule look shorter.

 

Can I be sedated? Yes, for any patient who needs it.

 

What if something goes wrong after I have flown home? Contact us first. If we have a partner dentist or clinic in your region, we refer you there for examination and X-rays, and they report their findings to us. If we do not have a partner in your region, you tell us what has happened and send photographs, and our dentists in Istanbul review it. If the problem falls under your guarantee, we invite you to Istanbul and put it right free of charge. Read the guarantee policy, including what it does not cover, before you travel.

 

Can the partner clinic treat me instead of me flying back? No, and we would rather say so now than after you need it. The partner clinics examine and diagnose; the treatment is done by us, in Istanbul, by the team that did the original work and has your records. We think that produces a better result than handing your case to a clinic seeing it for the first time.

 

Why is it so much cheaper in Turkey? Staff costs, laboratory costs, property costs and currency, plus a domestic market that has a great many dental graduates.

Not different ceramic and not different implants — we publish the brands we use. What price does not change is how much of your tooth has to be removed, which is why choosing on price alone is choosing on the wrong variable.

 

Can I see before-and-after photographs? Yes, of real patients, with their consent, and we will tell you what treatment each case actually had — including how many teeth and whether they were veneers or crowns.

 

How much does it cost? Our prices are published per tooth, in pounds sterling. We do not quote by package, because a package is a price attached to a number we have not yet had a reason to choose.