I spent 30 years not smiling in photos.
Not the kind of not-smiling where you're just being serious. The kind where you're aware of your teeth every single time a camera comes out. Where you've trained yourself to close your mouth before anyone notices. Where you've just quietly accepted that a real, open smile isn't something that belongs to you.
Then my dentist told me my teeth needed to come out.
The number landed immediately: $5,350 for the extractions alone. Then the dentures — another $4,000 minimum. Over $9,000 on the table before a single thing had changed.
But the money wasn't the hardest part.
The hardest part was the sequence. First your teeth are gone — and that's permanent, there's no going back from that. Then someone hands you a catalogue and asks you to pick a smile you've never seen on your own face. Then you spend thousands getting dentures built from that guess.
What if I go through all of that, spend all of that, and I look in the mirror and the person looking back doesn't feel like me? There's no refund. There's no redo. You made your choice with your eyes closed and now you're living with it.
I needed to see my face before I committed. Not a stock image. Not a generic smile pasted onto a stranger. My face. My features. What I could actually look like on the other side of this decision.
So I built one. I taught myself the workflow from scratch — ComfyUI, inpainting, face consistency models — and got it working on my own machine. When the result finally came back the way it was supposed to, I sat with it for a long time.
For the first time I could see what was possible — on my own face, before a single tooth came out. The fear didn't disappear, but the decision stopped feeling like a trap.
That's what I built SmileForward to do.
Not a cosmetic preview. Not a fun filter. A way to make a $9,000 decision — or whatever your number is — with your eyes open instead of blind. To know what you're choosing before you're committed to it.
The extractions are booked. The money is real. And the problem this solves is one I'm living right now.
If you're sitting in that same place — staring down a major dental decision and wishing you could just see it first — this is for you.