Dr Bernard Touati
in his Paris surgery
KATE MIDDLETON VISITS THEM.
ROMAN ABRAMOVICH FLIES THEM OVER.
MRS YELTSIN BAKES THEM CAKES.
MEET THE SUPER-DENTISTS
Hilary Rose discovers the surgeries where a simple filling costs £1,000
PORTRAITS Nadav Kander
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GETTY IMAGES, AFP
On the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, next to
Jimmy Choo and opposite Christian Dior, is
a plain door with a discreet nameplate. It reads
simply, “Dr Touati”. You might think that in such
a glamorous location, Bernard Touati would be a
plastic surgeon or a society psychiatrist, but he’s
not. He is a dentist; though not just any dentist…
He is one of a new breed of dentists who are
taking our smiles beyond mere fillings and
flossings to the next level of perfection, and
transforming our idea of what a visit to the
dentist should be like. And while Dr Touati’s
patient list reads like Who’s Who, more of
us than ever are convinced that a straight,
white smile is not a luxury, but a necessity.
We are willing, quite literally, to put our
money where our mouths are.
“There has been a paradigm shift,” says
Dr Touati, “from dentists being about function
and fear and metallic alloys to them being
more glamorous, with beautiful, comfortable
surroundings, and all about aesthetics. It’s
not so very different from the spa. It doesn’t
even smell like the dentist’s did 30 years ago,
because we have flowers and essential oils.
The experience should not be unpleasant.”
His practice is a testament to that belief:
it’s a haven of fresh flowers, designer furniture
and expensive coffee-table books, with art
on the walls and polished parquet on the floor.
He treats people who have red carpets to
tread and countries to run; people who only
ever find themselves in pleasant, comfortable
surroundings, whether it’s a private jet, the
penthouse suite or the dentist’s. At the age
of 63, this small, tanned, smiley man, who
was born in Morocco but moved to Paris when
he was 13, still works 11-hour days. His one
concession to age is working a four-day week,
but he uses his day off to paint the artwork
that hangs on the walls, and his small office,
next to the treatment room, is filled with
photos of his children and grandchildren.
Having first, by word of mouth, become the
dentist of choice for French actors and singers,
he gradually became the go-to man for the
rest of the world, starting with Russia. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country’s
elite clamoured for him to sort out the
ruination wrought by Soviet dentistry. Boris
Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, was in the vanguard,
doubtless like many of his patients while
on a shopping trip to Paris. Soon enough,
he began treating her husband and the rest
of the family, followed by Vladimir Putin, and
oligarchs including Boris Berezovsky and
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before the latter’s
unfortunate run-in with Putin saw his
teeth put beyond Touati’s help, behind
bars in a Siberian jail. Roman Abramovich,
the owner of Chelsea Football Club, has
become a patient and a friend. He had a fully
equipped dental clinic installed in his Moscow
house and flies Touati over in his private jet.
Abramovich isn’t the only one: Yeltsin’s wife
bakes him cakes, and he’s been invited to
dinners, holidays and weddings.
“Yesterday I had lunch with the former
prime minister of a very important country,”
he says. “Every time he comes to Paris,
the first thing he does is give me a call. But
I don’t do this job just to be the dentist to the
stars; I’ve been doing it for 41 years because
I love it. It’s my passion. They open their
mouths for me, but I will not open my
mouth to tell you their secrets.”
It’s not just the Russians. Diane von
Furstenberg said he’d be worth moving to
Paris for, and one oligarch told him: “You
could be in Zimbabwe and I’d go there.”
Gwyneth Paltrow recommended him to
the fashion designer Valentino, in spite of
never having been to him herself. Madonna
has leant back on the grey leather chair
on the Avenue Montaigne, as have Africa’s
potentates, and most of the royalty of the
Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Qatar to
name but two – have him on speed-dial.
There is precious little that he can’t tell
about their lives from looking at their teeth.
“I treated some princes from the Middle
East and I know they took cocaine because
their gums were destroyed from rubbing it
on them. They had a lot of decay in the base
of the teeth. You can tell if people smoke
or drink; if they’re nervous, they have
clenching or signs of grinding. If women
are bulimic, their enamel disappears.
Teeth tell you a lot of things.”
Dr Touati on the Duchess
of Cambridge’s teeth:
‘They aren’t aligned.
Dr Fillion did some little
micro-rotations so it
looks like a natural smile’
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PHIL FISK
Didier Fillion –
Kate Middleton’s dentist – in
his London surgery
What the British would tell you about their
teeth, according to the British Academy of
Cosmetic Dentistry, is that a third of us are
“concerned” by the look of our mouths and
that only one in four likes their smile. “The
English got serious about their teeth about
20 years ago,” says Touati, who screws a loupe
like a jeweller’s into his eye when he’s working.
“Until then, even wealthy, well-dressed people
had terrible teeth.” The problem, he says, was
partly cultural – we’re ten years behind the
rest of the world when it comes to our teeth
– and partly the NHS. “Aesthetic dentistry is
like luxury fashion,” he says. “If you work with
cashmere, it’s more expensive than H&M.”
Cosmetic surgery for teeth, like any other
type of cosmetic surgery, is not something that
the NHS will generally stump up for. You can’t
have a white filling on the NHS, for instance,
unless it’s one of your front teeth, or a
porcelain crown. Braces for adults are usually
‘IF YOU CAN AFFORD
TO GO TO THE PUB,
YOU CAN AFFORD TO
WHITEN YOUR TEETH’
off-menu, because fitting them to children
is deemed more effective. Factor in that NHS
dentists are no longer ubiquitous. No wonder
more and more of us are paying to go private.
As Dr David Winkler, President of the British
Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry, puts it: “If you
can afford to go to the pub twice a week,
you can afford to get your teeth whitened.”
The figures bear him out. In 1988, we spent
£180 million on private dentistry. By 2009,
that figure was £1,818 million, a tenfold
increase. It used to be that the teeth we had
at 20 or 30 were the teeth we had for life.
Now, they could be just the beginning: Touati
has clients in their seventies and Winkler has
fitted orthodontic braces on 80-year-olds. But
it’s people aged 45-54 who are most likely
to have cosmetic dentistry.
“People that age will spend money on the
way they look,” agrees Dr Ian Smith, a dentist
in Manchester. “The children have finished
school, they’ve paid off their mortgage and
now they’re choosing to spend their money
on their teeth. Thirty per cent of my patients
want cosmetic dentistry, and that number’s
increasing. Thirty years ago, people wanted
a check-up and fillings. Now, they want
whiter teeth, straighter teeth and for gaps
to be closed. They don’t want silver fillings,
they want white. People read magazines
and they want a smile makeover.”
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PHIL FISK
Private practices are springing up all over
the country to service the demand, specialising
only in cosmetic dentistry, from Swiss Smile
in the West End of London, to the nationwide
Transform clinics, NuSmile treatment centres
and Total Orthodontics. A study has shown
that three quarters of the population as
a whole would change their smile if they
could, and most of them are women:
60 per cent of Touati’s patients are female.
The first thing The X Factor does with
successful contestants is send them to
Dr Mervyn Druian and Dr Ken Spektor’s
London Cosmetic Dentistry practice to get
their teeth bleached. “People want whiter,
brighter, straighter teeth,” says Dr Winkler,
“and the NHS doesn’t do any of that. It deals
with diseases and broken teeth. The NHS
is based on ‘catastrophic dentistry’ – wait
until something happens.”
Dr Didier Fillion is to London what
Dr Touati is to Paris. Fillion, 75 per cent
of whose patients are female, specialises in
“invisible” braces, which he fits to the backs
of teeth, and it was to his smart, ultra-discreet
Wimpole Street practice that Kate Middleton
headed when she decided she needed teeth
fit for a princess. Naturally, he’s far too
discreet to talk about it. Did he treat her?
“I can’t say anything,” he replies, smiling
and looking as pleased as someone would if
she were his patient. “I’m sorry. I can’t confirm
or deny it.”
It falls to Touati to say more. In fact, as
soon as we sit down in Paris, he says excitedly
that Fillion did “your” princess’s teeth.
“They aren’t absolutely aligned,” he adds.
“In the United States they want teeth that are
symmetrical, monochromatic, artificial. He did
some little micro-rotations on Kate Middleton
so that it looks like a natural, healthy smile,
but not artificial.” The lack of artificiality is key:
there are fashions in teeth, and if your teeth
are misaligned or crooked, the fashion used to
be to slap porcelain veneers over them. Now,
dentists such as Touati and Fillion prefer to
work with what they’ve got – which usually
means extractions and braces – and keep things
as natural as possible. As one dentist puts it,
“The slow fix is often better than the quick fix.”
Most of Fillion’s patients are aged between
30 and 40, but one is 78, and the Duchess of
Cambridge apart, he’s perfected the smiles of
Sadie Frost, Kelly Brook and John Galliano.
Once a month, he flies to Morocco to treat
that country’s royal family, and he has another
clinic in Geneva where most of his patients
are from Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia.
“In Europe, we want something more
adapted to each personality, not like in America,”
he explains. “Tom Cruise’s teeth are too perfect
for me. I don’t like teeth that look like piano
keys.” The concentrations of bleach permitted
in the US are banned by the EU, so our teeth
Dr Fillion
FILLION SPECIALISES
IN ‘INVISIBLE’ BRACES,
WHICH HE FITS TO
THE BACKS OF TEETH
will never gleam so unnervingly bright. But
they are shinier than those seen in the former
Soviet bloc. “And the Russians,” Fillion
continues, “have very bad teeth. They are very
demanding, and they have a lot of money.”
So how much money do they actually
need? What’s the going rate for getting
a set of perfect teeth in bijou surroundings?
The answer, on Wimpole Street, is about
£3,000, but it can rise to £10,000 if there
are a lot of extractions and years of work.
In Paris, Touati charges €1,000 (£860) for
a filling and €1,000 for whitening, and finds
no shortage of people willing to pay.
“I think it’s affordable,” he says. “I look
at the price of handbags and I think what
we do, which is unique, is incredible. But
you have to be reasonable. People know
how much something costs. If a pair of boots
costs, say, £300, you might agree to pay £400
if they’re from Gucci, but you won’t pay
£4,000. It’s the same for me. People will pay
20 per cent more, no problem, but if I’m
asking four times the price, they’ll leave.”
If you need a mouthful of implants, the
sky’s the limit – maybe as much as €50,000
(£43,000) – but as Touati stresses, that’s rare.
“That’s if you need a full jaw rehabilitation.
If you take care of your teeth, you will never
have to spend a lot of money.”
Besides, it’s not just about the teeth, or indeed
the money. Touati says he’s treated people for
free, and if he likes someone and wants to help
them, he’ll negotiate. Equally, if he doesn’t like
someone, he’ll show them the door. He recently
did just that with the widow of someone he
will only describe as a very famous French
artist. She had come to see him from her
home in the South of France, and made the
mistake of trying to tell him imperiously what
he was going to do. He begged to differ.
“It’s very personal,” he says, with a Gallic
shrug. “I’m not treating a machine, I’m not
a trader. You’re in their personal space, you
can smell them. If they aren’t nice, or they
always come late, or they cancel at the last
minute, they are bad patients and you don’t
make an effort for them. If I like them and
I want to do the job, I adapt my fees.”
He’s also prepared to adapt his life:
an oligarch, suffering from toothache
one weekend, begged Touati to fly over
and treat him in London, but the dentist
pleaded a prior family engagement. “No
problem,” said the businessman. “I’ll fly your
whole family over, put you all up in a top
hotel, and get you tickets for whatever West
End musical you like.” Soon enough, la
famille Touati found themselves on a private
jet bound for London. (“Don’t get used to
flying on a private jet,” says Touati. “My
nurse dreams of it. They pick you up, you
go to a small airport, they’re waiting for
you, nice food, nice drink, you can lie down
and a car’s waiting for you when you land.”)
Fillion’s patients come to him from as far
afield as Nigeria, Korea and Kuwait for the
simple reason that they can and that he’s
the only person who can do what he does.
“The future of treatment is the invisible
appliance,” he says, flicking through a book
of ghoulish before-and-after photos. “It’s
cosmetic surgery for the mouth.”
But why are we doing this? Is it just
a fashion? Or is there a deeper reason?
“Research has shown that if someone has
a nice smile, we’re more prone to hire them,”
says Touati. “We think handsome people
are smarter than they really are. A nice smile
gives you self-confidence, and self-confidence
can change your life. Whether you’re a
secretary or a prominent person, you want
to have a sound, natural, healthy smile. It’s
like gastronomy: once you fulfil the basic
needs – no pain, good function – you want
to have more. After that you say, ‘Why not
make them nice and beautiful?’
“But,” he adds with a grin, “if you go
to Uzbekistan, most people just want teeth
that can chew.” n
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