When you lose your teeth and the bone that supports it, you lose support for the lower third of the face. This leads to there being more skin than there is tissue to support the skin, causing the skin to sag or fold. This is what we describe as the concertina effect.
FOY® Dentures are able to restore the lost support, rebuilding the teeth and jaw with dentures scaled to your skin and muscles. The effect can be a dramatic reduction in many of the most common facial wrinkles. Some degree of this rejuvenating effect was recently demonstrated in a small Italian study on the use of implant dentures for tooth replacement.
What Wrinkles Develop after Tooth Loss
Most people don’t realize the full impact of tooth and bone loss on the appearance of the face. Many of the most common wrinkles people experience as a result of aging are actually related to dental changes.
For the purposes of this study, they looked at many of these effects of aging, including:
- Marionette lines
- Nasolabial folds
- Corner of the mouth lines
- Upper and lower radial lip lines
- Labiomental crease
- Fullness of the lips
Marionette lines run from the cheeks down to the jaw line. They’re called marionette lines because they make it look like your mouth is a separate part, like in a puppet or nutcracker. Nasolabial folds run from the sides of the nose in a curve around the mouth. They’re often called parentheses lines (especially by marketers of facial fillers) because they create what looks like parentheses around your mouth.
Corner of the mouth lines are kind of like crow’s feet on the mouth, and they’re the predecessors to the uneven lip folds that contribute to angular cheilitis. Radial lip lines are sometimes called “lipstick lines” because they catch lipstick and draw it out radially from the lip. The labiomental crease is the depression between the prominences of lip and chin. This can grow with bone loss, contributing to the appearance of witch’s chin. Lip fullness is a youthful trait. It partly diminishes because of a loss of fat in the lips, but also because of a loss of support from teeth.
This study didn’t look at wrinkles around the eyes, such as crow’s feet , but these can also be caused by tooth and bone loss.
Significant Improvement Related to Implant Dentures
To gauge the impact of implant dentures on facial appearance, researchers looked at 31 subjects who received the restorations for both upper and lower arches. The subjects, whose average age was 62, were photographed both before and after the procedure. Blinded reviewers rated both pictures on a standardized scale of wrinkles. The researchers compared the ratings for the two photos using a statistical tool and found that most of the wrinkles improved, including radial lip lines, nasolabial folds, marionette lines, and corner of the mouth lines.
Dentures Designed for Rejuvenation
This study didn’t really tell us how much people saw their wrinkles improve, just that there was some measure of improvement. It establishes the principle, but leaves the degree of improvement up in the air.
FOY® Dentures are designed to maximize the rejuvenation we can achieve. By using neuromuscular dentistry, we are able to fit your dentures comprehensively to fully replace the lost support, dramatically reducing the appearance of many facial wrinkles and improving the appearance of turkey neck and jowls.
To learn how much rejuvenation you can see with FOY ® Dentures, please call (803) 781-9090 today for an appointment with a denture dentist at Smile Columbia Dentistry.
