A young woman has claimed she was given veneers during a nightmare trip to the dentist which was meant to be for a routine root canal.
Caitlyn Weld, 22, posted a viral video of the jarring moment she realized all of her front teeth had been whittled down in preparation for the fake teeth.
As a college student Weld moved from Tennessee to Florida and went to a new dentist when she learned she had a hole in one tooth and needed a procedure.
Not knowing what to expect, Weld had no idea her chompers were being prepared for aesthetic teeth until it was too late, and claimed the dentist told her that is what they assumed she wanted.
‘I didn’t have a mirror during the whole thing so I couldn’t see what was going on,’ Weld said on TikTok. ‘My teeth were literally shaved off.
‘I was scared, so I asked the lady as we were in the room “what does a root canal feel like? Is it going to hurt, can you explain to me the procedure?” But she didn’t speak very well English so I never really found out.’
Weld was in disbelief when she finally saw her shaved smile but said she went along with it because that is what the dentist told her to do.
‘They told me that the severity of the hole in one of my teeth, the one I got the root canal done, was so bad that they took precautions to just prevent it from happening in any of my teeth,’ she said.
‘[The dentist said] girls my age normally want all their teeth that show to be the same color and they didn’t want one color to be brighter than the rest of them and they also told me for safety of my teeth.
‘I was just like “okay,” I was dumb, I was 18, I had no idea about teeth nothing so I just went along with it. They made it sound necessary, we didn’t know any different.’
The process of getting permanent veneers was painful and Weld claimed she was given uneven temporary ones that had to get filed down so she could eat.
‘I remember when they took off the temporary ones and the air hitting whatever the heck was left was probably the worst pain I’ve ever seen,’ she said.
Now several years later, Weld finally feels comfortable sharing her story and showing off her new smile.
‘These are my teeth now, they really don’t look too much different than the previous teeth. I feel like they are a little bit longer, I also bite my gums really bad when I’m chewing which I never used to really do,’ Weld said.
Weld choose not to identify the dentist because she views it as a funny story and something she has learned to live with.
Veneers have become more popular in recent years, amid a drive to get a pearly white smile — with nearly 600,000 people getting them every year.
For veneers, dentists must clean and file down teeth before supergluing pearl-white coverings to the front — at a cost of up to $4,000 per tooth, or $40,000 per smile.