Prosthetic Poetry of the Unspottable: Myerson’s Teeth

The link between art and dentistry is beautifully expressed in this advertisement found in ADAQ’s Dental Mirror of 15 March 1945.

ADAQ Archives

ADAQ has two sample shade kits for the advertised Dr Myerson's True Blend  artificial teeth, in their original leather case. 

The image chosen and copy beautifully invoke the beauty and strength in nature’s imperfect hand. The natural smile is a landscape, and as nature carved the Grand Canyon’s striations and irregular edges, it also gave us similarly irregular enamel with its subtle shifts in hue.

Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments had demonstrated that colour is essentially a quality of light since the 17th century. Dentistry was one of the crafts were the science of colour and light could be used, to improve the quality of prosthetic teeth. Accurate shade and colour matching remains one of the more challenging parts of dental restorations to this day.

Simon Myerson was a Boston dentist and Harvard Professor of Dental Medicine in the early 1900s. Myerson studied ways to recreate the appearance of natural teeth with the use of carefully coloured blends of plastic, porcelain and enamel. With his three sons, one of whom was a talented ceramist, he founded the Ideal Tooth Co, later Myerson Tooth Co. in 1917, which continues over a 100 years later to advance prosthetic and cosmetic dentistry.

In the late 1930s, Myerson patented the True-Blend artificial teeth and facings. These new teeth had a porcelain core made of one of ten different shades that could be matched to the patients’ original teeth or to a shade that best worked with their complexion. A layer of transparent (grey) enamel was then set over the core, to give the tooth a more natural look.

In June 1940, the Times magazine in an article dedicated to Myerson’s invention, labelling the new True-Blend: the ‘unspottable teeth’: “Dr. Myerson's aim is to imitate, not improve on nature. So he often inserts little wedges of darker stained porcelain into the orange body, cuts ridges and erosions on the enamel coats, bleaches small patches, shadows imitation cavities, sets teeth crooked in their plastic plates.”[Times, June 1940]

Myerson’s glorious tribute to natural teeth was somewhat trumped by the contemporary rise of the ‘Hollywood smile’ and CL Pincus’ cosmetic dentistry principles. In keeping with the landscape similitude, the Hollywood smile look would be more akin to the blinding white of alpine glaciers, before the effects of climate change took over of course.