Rosemary was 6 years old when someone first commented on her smile.

It was school picture day. She put her on her favorite dress and had her mother fix her hair so she’d look her best. She was excited, ready to sit for her first-grade photo.

“As I was leaving the house, my mother said to me, ‘You know, you might not want to show your teeth,’” Rosemary recalls.

Her mother’s advice hit her hard. “I realized, ‘Oh, my smile’s not good enough,’” she remembers. She still has that black-and-white school photo from the early 1960s. In it, a 6-year-old Rosemary is smiling with her mouth closed, hiding her crooked teeth. Just like her mother had suggested.

Decades of closed-mouth smiles

Rosemary spent the next 4 decades smiling with her mouth closed. She was self-conscious about her crooked teeth and was certain they were the first thing people noticed about her. When Rosemary reached her 40s, she finally decided to upgrade her smile. She went to an orthodontist to get her teeth straightened.

She wore aligners for a couple of years, enduring twice-monthly visits to the doctor’s office. But when Rosemary completed treatment, she still wasn’t happy with her teeth. They were still crooked. “I wasn’t really thrilled with my smile,” she says. But wearing aligners longer to get her teeth straighter would have cost more money. Rosemary couldn’t afford it. So just as she had done for most of her life, she kept her mouth closed when she smiled.

Then Rosemary heard about SmileDirectClub. Impressed by the price and the convenience of teledentistry, she decided to have another go at getting the smile of her dreams. She figured she wasn’t too old to get the smile she had always wanted. “I liked the convenience,” she says. “Everything was going to be mailed to me.”

There would be no twice-a-month trips to the orthodontist. And the SmileDirectClub treatment could be completed in months, not years.

Rosemary got her impressions done, and a doctor in SmileDirectClub’s network prescribed Nighttime Aligners™ that she wore for 10 continuous hours per night.

“The thing I liked most was that I only needed to wear the aligners at night,” she says. “That was a game changer.”

SmileDirectClub cared about her

Rosemary was impressed with the service she got from SmileDirectClub. “From the very moment I began, I felt like everyone at SmileDirectClub really cared about giving you the smile you wanted,” she says.

At the end of her treatment, she still felt like her teeth could be straighter and her smile better. She talked, via SmileDirectClub’s teledentistry platform, to her doctor, who agreed to do another set of impressions and prescribe another 9 weeks of aligners – at no additional cost. “They were wonderful about it,” Rosemary says.

The additional aligners  did it. Rosemary finally got the smile she had always wanted. These days she smiles big to show the world her straight teeth. A new smile has given her a new sense of confidence that she never had before. “There’s an easiness now that I didn’t have before, and it comes from moving through life never having to second-guess your smile.”

She’ll never be self-conscious again, she says. “Through SmileDirectClub, I got back that 6-year-old girl’s smile.”