Remember when "million dollar smile" was a figure of speech?

I volunteer in a homeless shelter, and plenty of the folks I see there have lousy teeth. It's no surprise. They're poor. Many live on the streets. They haven't always led the healthiest of lives. They've abused drugs. They've abused alcohol. Their diets may not be the greatest. They've been in prison. They've been in fights.

Some have no teeth at all.

One fellow - an older guy - has a terrible underbite, and, while most of his lower teeth are missing, he does have a set of protruding lower fangs. His condition can only be described as disfiguring, and I'm sure it has impacted every aspect of his life. On top of that, I suspect he's in pain. Having that degree of underbite can throw your entire body off.

I've never spoken with him. I've only seen him come through the foodline, where there's no time to chat with anyone. I suspect he grew up in a rural area (I'm thinking in the South), where there likely would have been poor or no access to dental care. I may be wrong (and I may be being judge-y) here. If he comes into the Resource Center, where there's often an opportnity for a convo, I might find out where he's from. (A lot of our guests like to chat.)

I thought of this fellow when I read about Thomas Connolly, DDS, who, from his offices in NYC (SoHo: think edgy) and Beverly Hills (think buckets o' money), outfits

his patients with "million dollar smiles." Literally.

Dubbed the "Father of Diamond Dentistry" by Rolling Stone - perhaps the only dentist to be dubbed anything by Rolling Stone - Connolly has a lot of well-known patients. 

[He] reconstructed Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds.

The total cost: $1.6 million. (Source: NY Times)

That was back in 2021, when diamond dentures weren't so much of a thing. Fast forward, and Connolly and his team "now perform diamond dentistry almost daily."

Post Malone is by no means the only big name patient Connolly's worked with. 

[He] has reconstructed the mouths of the rappers Gunna and Lil Yachty, the professional boxer Devin Haney, the baseball pitcher Marcus Stroman, the Hall of Fame basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, the Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and others.

Admittedly, I've never heard of Gunna or Devin Haney. But those other Connolly patients are big names. (Amazingly, I have heard of Lil Yachty.)

And then there's the biggest of the big names, even if the biggest of the big names is only a two-letter word.

Yes, Ye - once known as Kanye West - hired Connolly to create the "six-figure titanium structure" that Ye began showing off a short while back.

You don't have to pay a milion dollars to get in a Connolly chair:

Full diamond teeth range from $100,000 to $2 million, and porcelain veneers with diamond insets from $10,000 to $75,000.

I'm guessing those $100K diamond choppers aren't much higher in quality than cubic zirconium. But $100K is still a lot to pay for a set of teeth. 

And I'm not going to criticize veneers. A while back - a long while: maybe 20 years, maybe more - I got veneers for my front teeth, which were chipped so badly that the bonding my dentist kept trying never held. I can't recall what I paid, but it was a lot. ($7K for four sticks in my mind.) So $10K in 2024 for a veneer with a diamond inset doesn't sound outrageous pricewise.

But dental diamonds? 

Sorry, but that does strike me as outrageous. As does having a multi-million dollar mouth. 

I guess it's a logical extension of the gold grills that rappers started sporting nearly twenty years ago. And even variations on the gold grills theme have been around for, like, forever. Archaeologists have discovered Etruscan "golden dental appliances" from the seventh century BC. 

And those modern grills have been sporting diamond inlays for a while now. Full diamond teeth though, that's something new. 

I don't get it. But I'm not supposed to.

Connolly insists that:

“This is not a gimmick...We changed the profession a little bit and pioneered something that was catching on and made it a little more mainstream.”

I guess "a litle more mainstream" doesn't mean full-blown mainstream...And, of course, it will never become mainstream among us old fuddy-duddies, just happy to be hanging on to our own teeth.

But spending more than a million dollars on your mouth does seem cra.

Much as I'd like to, I'm not going to engage in the sophistry of arguing that the money could be better spent on, say, dental work for the fellow with the underbite and fangs. Rich folks, celebreties, can do whatever they want with their money. And if they want to keep Dr. Connolly and the engineers and jewelers he works with employed, so be it.

Still, I can't help but think of the guys I see day in, day out, who'd like to have a few good teeth in their heads.

Just sayin'...