They wanted Hollywood smiles. They got dental nightmares.

Lyndsay Carreno was on a date a few years ago when she bit into a sushi roll and felt a veneer slip out of place. She didn’t panic; it was a sensation she had felt before.

Carreno was 24 when she had porcelain shells placed over four of her own front teeth, something she did to improve the appearance of her smile. Within a couple of years, she’d had two of her new teeth replaced, and she regretted having the procedure done in the first place.

“Aesthetically, they give me what I want,” Carreno, who is now 31, tells Yahoo of the veneers. Her natural teeth were jagged and too large for her liking. “But to this day, I’m still dealing with issues.”

The pursuit of perfect-looking teeth has fueled the demand for veneers, which has a global market that’s predicted to be valued at $3.88 billion by 2031. Data shows that over 50% of dental visits are currently driven by aesthetic concerns rather than dental issues. Such was the case with Carreno, who only had cosmetic rather than functional complaints about her teeth.

It was her mom’s dental makeover — she got a set of implants and crowns after losing her front teeth in an accident — that drew Carreno to consider veneers. “I just remember hers looked so beautiful,” she says. “She had no issues with them, and she was ecstatic to have them.”

But dental implants are different from veneers (which also vary in technique). “Hers are screwed into a surgical peg; they’re actually more structurally sound than her teeth were,” Carreno points out. “What is a veneer? It’s a porcelain piece that they glue to the top of your now-shaved-down tooth. When you hear it explained like that, obviously, you shouldn’t do that to your perfectly functioning, healthy tooth. But you just hear that it’s gonna look the way you want it to. And again, I was so young. I just did it.”

TikTok influencer Alix Earle recently talked about having a similar feeling of regret after getting 10 veneers a few years back. She told her followers about the experience in a video in which she was filing down a veneer that had chipped while traveling, and encouraged viewers to embrace their natural teeth.

Dr. Sandip Sachar, a New York-based dentist who specializes in smile makeovers, tells Yahoo that veneer regret is a real thing that’s often experienced by people who don’t do enough prior research about the process or go to the wrong doctor. “These patients were not fully educated and informed on the process and what to expect prior to starting, leaving them in shock after realizing a good amount of healthy tooth structure had been filed off irreversibly,” she says. “This can have lasting consequences that no one really talks about.”

‘I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into’

Carreno was living in Washington, D.C., when she got her veneers and went with a dentist who was friends with her colleague. “He’s the first dentist I saw, and he says, ‘We can make them look beautiful,’” Carreno recalls. “I don’t get a second opinion, I don’t talk to anyone else. I don’t even look up reviews on him to see if he’s good at cosmetics. I just go, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”

Mackenzie Nichols, a registered nurse living in Chicago, hadn’t experienced any issues with her teeth but was inspired to get veneers at age 27 when she saw how they improved the appearance of her neighbor’s teeth. “I loved how they looked and I just wanted to do that too,” she tells Yahoo. She sought out the dentist her neighbor had used.

Nichols hadn’t done much research when she went into the dentist’s office. When she asked about having six of her top teeth done to make her smile more uniform, the dentist suggested that eight would “just look better.” She trusted his opinion, and before long, he was shaving her teeth down to get them ready for some covers.

“I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I didn’t realize how much of a process it was going to be,” says Nichols, now 30. “Going into it, I was just excited to have a new smile. Then once we actually started the process, and my teeth were prepped and there was no going back, that’s when I was like, ‘What did I do?’”

This is a common time for patients to experience some doubts, according to Sachar. She calls it prep regret. “You may think you’re OK with filing down some of the tooth, but as soon as it’s actually done and you realize how irreversible it is, you’re going to go home with the sinking feeling of, What have I done?” she says. It’s a normal response, even for those who have carefully thought through the decision and vetted their provider. For people who haven’t, or those who are filing down healthy teeth, that regret might be worse, especially when the process continues to unfold in a way that makes a patient lack confidence.

Nichols recalls being sent home from her dentist’s office in temporary veneers, typically made of resin and worn while the permanent porcelain teeth are created, which is a common practice. However, hers weren’t secured to her natural teeth, and she was told she had to be on a liquid diet in order not to disrupt them for the interim weeks. She lasted less than 12 hours before making an emergency return to the office and having the owner of the dental practice take over her case.

The eight veneers that she initially agreed to get done turned into eight crowns — which cover the entirety of the tooth, rather than just the front surface — and four veneers because of the mistakes the original dentist made in prep. Some of the teeth were filed down too much, and her bite pattern wasn’t taken into consideration, Nichols adds. “What should have been like a two-week process turned into four months,” she says. “It was just a really bad experience.”

Continued complications

Nichols changed dentists once her permanent veneers were on. She has to go every three months for a cleaning and a laser treatment to take care of bacteria and inflammation of the gums that are caused by the mouth’s reaction to a foreign object (aka the veneers).

She says she’s also in need of a root canal because of damage that resulted from a veneer that wasn’t properly secured to her natural tooth. “I had the worst sensitivity because of it. I couldn’t even breathe in air without it hurting,” says Nichols. “I just haven’t done [the root canal] because I don’t want to go through the process of getting a veneer taken off and put back on again.”

Carreno switched providers after moving states and having multiple veneers pop out, even just from flossing her teeth. She’s also had to have a veneer replaced because of gum recession that it caused. “This is $2,000 every time I’m saying one’s been replaced by the way, because you’ve got to get a new tooth made at the lab,” she says. “And every time one has to be replaced, I’m getting a [numbing] shot in the front of my mouth, getting a temporary [veneer] put on, getting the shot again, getting the real one glued on. And it’s four or five weeks between all of that.”

Ali Holston got veneers to address dental problems caused by a recurring benign teratoma tumor in her jawbone. The 37-year-old has dealt with various complications ever since. From the temporaries alone, she experienced bad breath (known as veneer breath) because of bacteria that formed between her natural tooth and the ill-fitting cover. Within the first week of getting her permanent veneers, three of them popped off. The smell returned each time.

“The third time I went in [to the dentist] with my veneer in a Ziploc bag and said, ‘I did not sign up for this,’” says Holston. She switched providers shortly after and was told that the veneers weren’t sealed properly, which would allow them to easily pop off and eventually cause tooth decay (hence, the smell).

Luckily, Holston got her money back from the first dentist and had her veneers redone by the new provider. “I’ve only had the new permanent veneers on for about a week now. And I love them. They’re so much better,” she says.

Aesthetics

While Sachar says that making veneers look good is the easiest part of the process for dentists, not everybody is happy with the results. Holston, for instance, hated the look of the set placed on by her first dentist, who she says put them on her teeth without showing her beforehand what they would look like.

“He made this big show of revealing my smile to me. I had an out-of-body experience when he showed me my teeth. I feel like I floated up out of my body,” Holston tells Yahoo. “It was awful.” She’s thrilled with the newer set, which she says “looks like my normal, regular teeth, just a better version, which I’m really happy about.”

Nichols, on the other hand, still feels like she “settled” on her smile simply because she wanted the process to end. The first three sets of porcelain veneers that she saw were far from what she wanted. “By the time the fourth set came in, I was just so tired of being in temps,” she says. “I don’t hate how [the permanent veneers] look, but if I could go back, I would have them remake them again. They’re not exactly what I wanted.”

As for Carreno, she cried tears of joy when looking at her veneers for the first time. “I was so happy because I had always chewed with my mouth closed or with my hand in front of me. I never smiled in photos because of my teeth,” she says.

But trading that self-consciousness with the constant worry that she might have a dental emergency isn’t worth it for her. “I’ve just lost so many veneers that it’s a constant fear,” she says. “I am in a situation now where I have to have disposable income always in case I lose a tooth and need to get it replaced.”

The experience isn’t uncommon among celebrities either. Actress Jennifer Lawrence lost a veneer while filming Don’t Look Up and had to film most of it toothless. (A tooth was added in postproduction, so it wasn’t visible onscreen.) And model Ashley Graham posted an Instagram video revealing the stub of her natural tooth after a veneer popped off when she bit into a cookie.

It’s an unfortunate result of some dentist’s faulty work, according to Sachar, but not the case for many people who get veneers. “If everything is done correctly, veneers will last easily over 25 years,” she says. In order to find someone who is capable of that, she recommends looking for board-certified specialists like prosthodontists, examining patient reviews and getting access to before-and-after photos.

“Always ask, ‘What if I’m not happy?’ Because every dentist has a different policy on that one,” says Sachar. “In my practice, we’ll say, ‘We’re not done until you’re happy,’ but not all dentists will do that.”