ABSTRACT

Esthetic is considered a prime concern for both the practitioners and patients in the area of dentistry. Dentists should thoroughly understand the factors like beauty, harmony, balance, and proportion as are they perceived by the societies while planning treatment. Aim: The aim of the study is to evaluate how different gender, age groups, marital status, educational level, and previous cosmetic dental experience of the Saudi dental professionals and the laypersons will influence the selection of an ideal veneer smile design with various shapes of anterior maxillary teeth to their esthetic preferences. Methods: The present survey-based study included 282 dental professionals and lay persons as the sample. The patient and the treating doctor were administered the questionnaire and were further asked to rank the images in terms of score and order of preference. They were asked to put a checkmark on the five cells visual analogue scale (VAS) next to each image to define attractiveness, considering that, on the VAS, one indicated the least attractive and 5 showed the most attractive veneer smile design. Results: Out of 282 participants 106 were male and were 176 female participants. The participant ages were between 16 and 53 years. To find the association between categorical variables, the Mann-Whitney U test was used (with statistical significance set at 0.05).  When the responses were compared between the dentist and non-dentist, there was only a statistically significant difference (0.013) for picture 11 among all the 12 pictures responses. Conclusion: The Dental professionals and laypersons showed more similarities than differences when esthetic dental values were considered. Dental professionals were more critical than laypersons.