Diamonds Help to Create Million Dollar Smiles

Dr. Thomas Connelly has turned the cliché “million greenback smile” into fact.
In 2021, the “Father of Diamond Dentistry” — as Rolling Stone named him — reconstructed Publish Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, 8 platinum crowns and two 6-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds.
The full cost: $1.6 million.
“Posty wanted me he had terrible tooth,” stated Dr. Connelly, 51, seated comfortably on a sofa in one of his therapy rooms in his Beverly Hills business office.
“We’ve discovered a lot considering the fact that accomplishing Post’s mouth,” he reported, incorporating that he and his staff members of 3 now perform diamond dentistry just about every day, as nicely as fabricating prosthetics like the six-figure titanium framework that Ye, formerly recognized as Kanye West, uncovered to the earth in an Instagram story a few of months in the past.
Working with his jeweler and dental lab associates, Dr. Connelly, a bodybuilder with a comprehensive scalp tattoo and nearly comprehensive tattoo sleeves on both equally arms, has reconstructed the mouths of the rappers Gunna and Lil Yachty, the experienced boxer Devin Haney, the baseball pitcher Marcus Stroman, the Corridor of Fame basketball participant Shaquille O’Neal, the Baltimore Ravens vast receiver Odell Beckham Jr. and other people.
Full diamond enamel array from $100,000 to $2 million, and porcelain veneers with diamond insets from $10,000 to $75,000.
“This is not a gimmick,” he mentioned. “We transformed the profession a tiny bit and pioneered something that was catching on and produced it a very little extra mainstream.”
Mr. Malone’s reconstruction began in 2019 when, Dr. Connelly claimed, “we were in the inexperienced room at Madison Square Back garden right before a show and Publish walked up to me and questioned, ‘Can you do my whole tooth in diamond?’”
The dentist was with Isaac Bokhoor, co-operator of Angel Metropolis Jewelers, a Los Angeles small business well known with musicians. “Isaac and I responded at the identical time I go ‘yes’ and Isaac goes ‘no’ and Article just laughed. It bought me considering.”
To work out the system of embedding a diamond into a porcelain or total gold crown with a veneer took about two a long time of experimenting and tests. At just one point, Dr. Connelly claimed, he termed Mr. Malone and told him he wanted some cash for diamonds: “He manufactured it occur. Isaac and I purchased two $250,000 stones and completely wrecked them.”
“Everything we did did not perform,” he recalled. We “either turned the diamond black or blew it to bits.”
At last a freelance mechanical engineer worked out the course of action and Dr. Connelly refined it with the aid of Naoki Hayashi, the president of Top Variations Dental Laboratory in Irvine, Calif. (And, unexpectedly, the photographer of Mr. Malone’s dental operate that grew to become the deal with shot of his 2023 album “The Diamonds Assortment.”)
“We set jewellery like rings on our fingers, why not our teeth?” Mr. Hayashi said as a result of a translator.
Dr. Connelly stated that, regardless of the progressive mother nature of his function, he experienced picked out not to patent the method since “then you have to explain your method. I only perform with just one person and there is belief.”
Fewer than a calendar year after the diamond tooth, Mr. Malone returned to Dr. Connelly to have the 10 porcelain veneers on his lessen teeth changed with platinum veneers (the similar style that the dentist himself has).
There have been some troubles along the way. In mid-2022, the rapper little bit into a Rooster McNugget even though he was in Rome and one of the two canine diamonds fell out. It fell out all over again in October, while the musician was in Brazil. (In both equally instances he recovered the stone.) Now, Dr. Connelly reported, he has created the configurations much more safe.
While Mr. Malone may possibly have been the 1st with total-diamond tooth, bejeweled dental ornamentation is not specifically new.
“Etruscan Gold Dental Appliances: 3 Newly ‘Discovered’ Examples,” a 1999 report by the historian Marshall Joseph Becker in the American Journal of Archaeology, reported, “the Etruscan origins of golden dental appliances, close to the middle of the seventh century B.C. have lengthy been identified. These appliances are all fashioned from flat gold bands and made use of to hold a false tooth or tooth in area.”
Tooth modifications span hundreds of years and continents, and in the past two many years, they have included some significant sparkle to the rap and hip-hop tunes scene.
In 2005, the rapper Nelly introduced the song “Grillz,” bringing the idea of extravagant dental prostheses to modern-day preferred society. And its audio video clip, which changed the notion that dentistry desired gold only to incorporate toughness to a crown, involved far more than 70 near-ups of mouth jewellery.
“Back then it was mostly gold,” stated Elan Pinhasov, 27, who, with his father, Gabby, owns the jewellery brand Gabby Elan in New York Metropolis. “The prongs had been greater, and the diamonds more compact.”
The youthful Mr. Pinhasov said the small business generally custom made removable grills, and named LeBron James, Erykah Badu, Pharrell Williams and Child Cudi amongst its customers. (He also noted that, many thanks to social media, its purchaser base has shifted in modern a long time from 90 p.c adult men to almost 60 p.c females.)
The most popular grills now, he claimed, cover a single to a few teeth, although the business enterprise has performed a full set that coated 14 higher and 14 reduced enamel. And at Gabby Elan, a primary gold tooth is $300 its most costly piece was $6,500 for each tooth.
“Grills really don’t have to just take up your total mouth any more — they can be daintier, smaller,” Mr. Pinhasov claimed. “But they are nevertheless a concentration position. When there’s a little something shiny in your teeth people are like, ‘What is that?’ Isn’t it far better to say a diamond than a piece of lettuce?”
Mr. Bokhoor of Angel Metropolis Jewelers stated he also had seen the mounting popularity of inconspicuous grills. “If you’re capable to converse and sing, that appeals to a full new group,” he claimed from his Los Angeles office environment and workshop.
However, the organization, led by Mr. Bokhoor, 36, and his spouse, Sam Tack, 32, has expanded from grills in latest years to supplying the gems to Dr. Connelly. They have labored together on a total of about 25 total-diamond teeth and additional than 100 veneers with diamond inlays, symbolizing about 20 % of Angel City’s whole profits every calendar year. The rest of their revenue has been from the sale of watches and regular jewellery this sort of as chains and customized pendants.
“The No. 1 matter you see in a photo, the most predominant issue in a photo, is someone’s smile,” Mr. Bokhoor mentioned. “Until not too long ago it was persons placing tattoos on each individual component of their physique. This is like tattooing your tooth.”