Cosmetic Surgery Guide 2003

Beauty's Best

Dentists

Marc Lowenberg and Gregg Lituchy
230 Central Park South (212-586-2890)

A smile makeover usually takes two visits that last a few hours each, so any of-the-moment cosmetic dentist’s office has VCRs and stereos to keep its patients entertained. Marc Lowenberg and Gregg Lituchy also provide patients with laptops so they can work and check e-mails, and thereÂ’s a massage therapist on the premises to make the whole experience less stressful. Not everyone can afford a full set of veneers, so the doctors, who have been in practice together for twenty years, offer smile makeovers that combine veneers with bonding and bleaching, and they demonstrate what your smile will look like using composite materials on top of your existing teeth, a more accurate picture than the usual computer imaging. Courteney Cox Arquette, Cindy Crawford, Heidi Klum, Russell Simmons, Chris Rock, Marc Anthony, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Narciso Rodriguez are among their clients.

Lana Rozenberg
45 West 54th Street (212-265-7724)

The originator in New York of the dental-day-spa concept, Lana Rozenberg offers her patients warm neck wraps, eye compresses, and hand massages on the way to a prettier smile. She replaces silver fillings with porcelain ones, and unlike some cosmetic dentists, she also focuses on oral health; in fact, Johnson & Johnson has picked her as a spokeswoman. She uses the latest technology, such as Diagnodent, a laser that detects cavities before an X-ray can, and Difoti, which allows her to see decay around existing fillings. Justin Theroux and John Seigenthaler are patients.

Larry Rosenthal
30 East 76th Street (212-794-9600)

Larry Rosenthal prides himself on contouring teeth to match a face rather than just installing generic pearly whites. His specialty is what he calls the “smile-lift” to make the upper lip look fuller. Using recently developed porcelain laminates that are more translucent and natural-looking than the ones commonly employed, he makes the side teeth thicker, which in turn pushes out the upper lip. He founded the Rosenthal Institute at NYU, the cityÂ’s first aesthetic-dentistry-teaching facility.

Irwin Smigel
635 Madison Avenue, near 59th St. (212-371-4575)

Unlike many dentists, who depend on a lab to build the right-size crowns, Irwin Smigel prefers to order his crowns overbuilt and shapes them himself on the patient. He also widens the teeth on the sides and the back of the mouth to support the muscles in the face and around the mouth and reduce wrinkles. Smigel has been president of the American Society for Dental Aesthetics for 28 years, since its inception, and he travels to Asia and Europe teaching cosmetic dentistry.

In assembling this list, we drew upon the expertise of Castle Connolly Medical, the people behind our annual "Best Doctors" issue, and the publishers of America's Cosmetic Doctors and Dentists ($29.95: available in bookstores or through castleconnolly.com). The only book of its kind in the nation, it lists over 8,000 physicians and dentists screened by Castle Connolly's physician-led staff.