Photos by Dylan Schattman

Journalists love to resort to hyperbole to make their interview subjects seem more impressive. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s so pervasive that sometimes statements don’t hit with the gravity they should. So, with that awareness, when we say Dr. Thomas Connelly has accomplished the impossible, please know we are actually doing so with the utmost sincerity.

Connelly found a way to get people excited about going to the dentist.

Connelly doesn’t hypnotize his patients into thinking they’re somewhere—anywhere—besides the dental office. His innovation is far simpler than a magic trick or ruse—he offers a service people actually want. As a cosmetic dentist, Connelly doesn’t spend his time scraping tartar or removing impacted molars, he whitens smiles with veneers and adds a little sparkle by implanting diamonds. But that’s not all…

“I do some very interesting dentistry,” Connelly says, “mainly diamond work, precious metals, and stuff you never see on the average person. In addition, a lot of times while our patients are sleeping we do tattoos. We’ll run six, eight artists at the same time while the patients are having their mouth redone.”

The concept is enough to make one’s head spin. A patient simply sits in the chair, goes to sleep, and when they wake up they’re a completely different person.

Connelly has been transforming peoples’ smiles for decades. He wasn’t far into his dentistry career when he felt the urge to pursue cosmetic dentistry instead of a standard practice. There’s no art in the day-to-day of cleanings and cavity fillings, but in cosmetic dentistry Connelly is able to flex his artistic muscles.

“With restorative dentistry where you’re doing fillings and replacing diseased tooth structure with silver, plastic or gold, you’re really just patching holes,” he explains. “On the elective side of dentistry you’re taking porcelains and different materials and improving the aesthetics of someone’s smile. There’s usually nothing wrong with the tooth we’re adding. I think every dentist wants to be a cosmetic dentist because with elective dentistry you have a patient that’s more willing, it’s more lucrative, it’s more enjoyable and it’s a better environment.”

Connelly describes his work as “improving the aesthetics of someone’s smile,” but that is an understatement. It would be more apt to say that he takes a regular smile and blings it out with massive diamonds and other accoutrement. We’re not talking about simple gold teeth here: Connelly’s creations rival the Crown Jewels in opulence. Removable grills have long been a marker of success in the world of hip-hop, and with jewelers growing progressively more ostentatious over the years, it would take a serious innovation to get noticed. Enter Connelly and his client Austin—you probably know him better as Post Malone.

Post Malone had been a client of Connelly’s for a little bit, as he had some veneer work done. Small diamonds were placed in the porcelain of the veneers, but the rapper had an idea so crazy Connelly knew he had to try it.

“[Post Malone asked,] ‘Can’t we just make the whole tooth a diamond?’” Connelly recalls. “I was with my business partner Isaac from Angel City Jewelers, he handles the diamond side, and we just looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”

This was going to be a challenge. For one thing, it was going to be incredibly expensive—teeth are big—and require some ingenuity and a bit of trial and error. The experimentation period led to a fair amount of precious stones being destroyed as Connelly and his partners tried to figure out how exactly to turn Post Malone into a blinged-out version of Jaws from the James Bond films.

“He threw a bunch of money at the project,” Connelly says with a chuckle, “and we failed miserably. We wasted easily 40 carats of diamonds trying to do what we wanted to do, trying to understand the limitations of putting a diamond in the mouth. It’s not just that, it’s putting a diamond in the mouth that is going to function as a tooth. It needs to resist decay and it needs to resist the forces of chewing and function. To be able to eat food and chew without tasting gross, it needs to not harbor bacteria or smell.

“It sounds like a simple project, but there are aspects of it that require research and development,” he continues. “Austin knew that and didn’t care. It took us a couple of years, but we did it. When you see him in concert and the light will hit just right, you see it. These are not little diamonds. They are flawless, deep pavilion diamonds that reflect light more than a ring. It’s really something for me to see my work shining as he sings such beautiful music.”

For those of you trying to do the math at home, that’s at least a couple million dollars’ worth of diamonds cast into the trash heap. It may seem like a steep price to pay, but when you have a smile that not only looks like it’s worth a million bucks but could actually resell for that value, it’s all worth it.

Connelly is offering services people never even dreamed of before. With his A-list clientele and reputation already established, he doesn’t have the need for cheesy ads or billboards. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t dreamed up the perfect advertisement for him: Come to add ice to your smile, stay for the pain-free body suit!

Much like the diamond teeth, this innovation came along thanks to a famous client: NFL wide receiver and one-hand catch enthusiast Odell Beckham Jr., who wondered if it would be possible to pull double-duty while he was under anesthesia. Connelly did the research to make sure it wouldn’t violate any health codes, and voila! Pain-free tattooing was born.

Dentistry isn’t conducted in a sterile environment like heart surgery is—by definition mouths are gross and full of gunk, so it’s impossible to do sterile dentistry—so bringing in a team of tattooers was no problem. The room could get a little crowded with Connelly’s team working on the mouth and four or more tattooers working on the body, but once everybody found their spots the session would fly by. When the client wakes up they look completely different.

“As you can imagine, it’s pretty crazy,” Connelly says. He describes the experience of watching one of his clients come out of anesthesia to find their body covered in tattoos: “They wake right up and are like, ‘Woooah!’ And there’s no pain, the whole thing is exhilarating. What’s so cool about it is that I believe it’s created a new style of tattooing with people working together. It existed before, but not at such a fast pace. To get eight hours of six tattooers working together, that’s 48 hours of tattooing. And because they’re sleeping, you’re not doing the breaks, you’re not dealing with the fidgeting. They’re like, ‘My entire body looks amazing!’”

For his own steadily growing tattoo collection, Connelly has been doing it the old-fashioned way, despite having easy access to the pain-free alternative. He’s collected a number of interesting pieces over the years, but none is more striking than the black-and-grey masterpiece covering his head. It takes no more than a quick glance to realize it is the work of Chuey Quintanar, who came at the recommendation of Connelly’s business partner Travis Barker.

The head tattoo is just another way in which Connelly has stepped outside the box of a supposedly conservative profession. Everybody has an expectation as to how their dentist is going to look and, most likely, a little dread about the entire experience of visiting the dentist. Connelly has turned all of that on its head.

“In my profession, my look brings a very strange credibility to what I do,” he says. “If you look at somebody like me and you look at my work, it really gets people’s brains turning. ‘He’s not wearing a white coat and a tie, he doesn’t care how he looks. He must really know what he’s doing.’

“When I look at myself, I don’t feel like I’m tattooed,” Connelly continues. “I just feel normal.”