Smile Design and Implant Center

Smile design is a technical step, not a slogan. Before a failing front tooth is touched, the finished result gets drawn: how long the replacement should be, where its edge falls against the lower lip when you speak, how much of it shows when your face is at rest. Get that planning wrong and a surgically flawless implant still reads as wrong to everyone who looks at you. The Westfield Avenue practice Dr. Yunet Chao Perez runs puts that stage in front of the surgery rather than after it, and works in English and Spanish, which matters in Elizabeth, where a treatment plan often has to be explained twice, once to the patient and once to the adult son or daughter who came along to listen.

The rest of the practice is unremarkable in the good sense. Cleanings and fillings, a crown where a tooth has broken down too far to fill, bridges and dentures where teeth have already gone, root canal treatment, wisdom tooth removal — and on the cosmetic side, veneers and ClearCorrect aligners. The office opens at ten and runs into the evening Tuesday through Friday and keeps Saturday mornings, a shape that suits people who cannot give up a weekday morning.

The single-tooth implant is the procedure the office is named for, and its sequence is longer than most people assume. Digital radiographs establish how much bone surrounds the failing tooth. If that tooth still has to come out, the extraction is done as gently as possible and the empty socket is usually packed with graft material, because a socket left to heal alone loses width as it collapses inward. Three to four months later the implant itself, a threaded titanium post, is placed into that preserved bone and left to integrate for a further few months. An abutment is then attached and an impression taken for the crown that finally sits on top. A straightforward case runs roughly six to nine months start to finish; one needing a sinus lift or a larger graft runs longer.

Two practical limits are worth knowing before you plan around this address. The office is closed Mondays and Sundays, so a problem that starts on Saturday afternoon waits until Tuesday unless it is urgent enough for a hospital. And because cost tracks the amount of grafting your bone turns out to need, any figure quoted before the scan is a placeholder rather than a price. Ask for the estimate to be itemised into extraction, graft, implant and crown, so you can see which part of it is likely to move.