You can train yourself to smile with less gum showing by practicing controlled lip movements in front of a mirror, and the results can become noticeable within days. For people whose gummy smile has a structural cause, several medical and dental treatments can reduce gum display by 2 to 3 millimeters or more. The right approach depends on why your gums show in the first place.
Why Some People Show More Gum
A gummy smile isn’t a single condition with one cause. It can come from the bone structure of your upper jaw, the behavior of your lip muscles, or the way your gum tissue sits on your teeth. Understanding which factor drives your gum display helps you pick the most effective fix.
One of the most common causes is vertical maxillary excess, where the upper jawbone grew longer than average in the vertical direction, pushing the teeth and gums lower in the face. This positions the gum line below where it would typically sit, so even a normal lip movement reveals more tissue. A second common cause is a hypermobile upper lip. The muscles that lift your upper lip when you smile (primarily the levator labii superioris) pull the lip higher than usual, exposing gum tissue that would otherwise stay hidden. Some people have both: an overactive lip and a longer jaw.
Other contributors include altered passive eruption, where your gum tissue never receded to its adult position during development, making your teeth look short and your gums prominent. Gum overgrowth from certain medications can create a similar appearance. In many cases, more than one factor overlaps.
Smile Training Exercises You Can Do at Home
A smile exercise program developed by Gibson in 1989 focuses on building voluntary control over the muscles that lift your upper lip. The core idea is simple: by repeatedly practicing different levels of smile intensity in front of a mirror, you learn to stop your lip from rising past the point where gums become visible. Gibson’s method suggests practicing five times a day, and claims that complete control over different smile levels can be achieved within a few days of consistent work.
Here’s the basic sequence:
- Start at rest. Let your face relax completely, then slightly contract the muscles that lift your lip corners.
- Expand gradually. Widen your smile laterally and upward just enough to expose the edges of your upper teeth. Keep the corners of your mouth even and hold for 10 seconds.
- Find your limit. Increase tension in the smile muscles, pulling mostly outward rather than upward. Focus on not exposing gum tissue beyond the small triangles of gum between your teeth. Hold for 10 seconds.
- Practice the descent. Slowly relax until just the edges of your upper front teeth are visible. Hold for 10 seconds.
- Add resistance. Form a full smile and press your fingertips gently into each corner of your mouth, holding the position against that resistance.
A companion set of exercises conditions the muscles around your nose and upper lip. You wrinkle your nose as far as possible while relaxing the lip, then slowly draw the upper lip upward, hold for 10 seconds, and bring it back down with control. A variation adds finger pressure on the upper lip while curling it upward and holding. These strengthening exercises build the kind of fine motor control that lets you cap your smile height naturally. Visible results from the conditioning exercises typically take 3 to 5 months of daily practice.
The limitation of muscle training is obvious: it only works while you’re thinking about it. A spontaneous laugh or candid photo may still catch your gums. But for posed photos, video calls, and social situations where you’re aware of your expression, practiced control can make a real difference without any cost or medical intervention.
Botox for a Gummy Smile
If overactive lip muscles are the primary cause, small doses of botulinum toxin can weaken those muscles just enough to keep the lip from riding too high. The injection targets a specific point near where the lip elevator muscles converge (sometimes called the Yonsei point, located near the side of the nose). Dosing is straightforward: roughly 1 unit of toxin per millimeter of gum display. Someone showing 4 millimeters of gum would receive about 4 units at the primary site. In cases where multiple muscle groups contribute, additional injection points receive half that dose.
Results typically appear within a week. The effect holds strong for about 3 months, then gradually fades. By 5 months, gum display starts returning noticeably, and by 7 months most people are back to baseline. This means you’d need 2 to 3 treatments per year to maintain the look. At an average of around $108 per session (based on typical dosing at $12 to $15 per unit), the annual cost runs roughly $324 to $432.
Botox works best for mild to moderate gummy smiles caused by muscle hyperactivity. It won’t help if your gum display comes from excess jawbone length or gum tissue that covers too much of your teeth. It’s also temporary by nature, which some people see as an advantage: if you don’t like the result, it wears off on its own.
Gum Contouring and Crown Lengthening
When the issue is too much gum tissue covering your teeth rather than your lip pulling too high, reshaping the gum line can permanently reduce how much gum is visible. Two procedures accomplish this in different ways.
A gingivectomy removes soft gum tissue to expose more of the tooth crown. It’s a simpler procedure with a quicker initial recovery, but research shows a significant drawback: the gum tissue tends to grow back. In one study, the gum tissue crept back toward its original position over the 12 weeks following surgery, and the net gain in exposed tooth length was only about 0.3 millimeters. This “tissue rebound” can be frustrating after investing in a surgical procedure.
Crown lengthening with bone recontouring (ostectomy) removes both soft tissue and a small amount of the underlying bone. This approach is more involved, but the results are far more stable. In the same study, this method produced about 4.9 millimeters of additional exposed tooth length, and the gum margin stayed put after the 6-week healing mark with no significant rebound through the 12-week follow-up. For lasting results, this is the more reliable option.
Both procedures can be performed with traditional instruments or lasers. Laser gum contouring tends to cost more but offers less bleeding and faster healing. Expect to pay $50 to $350 per tooth, with most people needing treatment on six front teeth for a balanced result. That puts the total between $1,000 and $3,000.
Lip Repositioning Surgery
Lip repositioning is a procedure designed specifically for people whose upper lip rises too high when they smile. It works by limiting how far the lip can travel upward. The surgeon removes a strip of tissue from the inside of the upper lip (between the lip and the gum), then sutures the lip closer to the gum line. This physically restricts the lip’s range of motion.
A meta-analysis of different lip repositioning techniques found that gum display decreased by an average of 2.68 to 3.22 millimeters at the six-month mark, depending on the specific surgical approach. That’s a meaningful reduction for most people, often enough to take a smile from noticeably gummy to within a range most people consider normal. The procedure is done inside the mouth, so there’s no visible scarring on the face. Recovery involves swelling and limited smiling for a few weeks.
Orthodontic Options for Structural Causes
When the gummy smile stems from the position of the teeth and jaw rather than soft tissue or muscle behavior, orthodontic treatment can push the entire upper set of teeth upward into the jawbone. This is called intrusion, and it directly reduces how low the teeth and gums sit in the face.
Traditional braces alone can’t generate enough force to intrude teeth reliably, so orthodontists use small titanium screws (temporary anchorage devices, or TADs) placed into the palate or the bone between tooth roots. These screws act as fixed anchor points, allowing consistent upward force on the teeth over several months. In one documented approach, a screw placed in the center of the palate was connected to a modified wire appliance bonded across all the upper teeth, pulling the entire arch upward and backward. This kind of treatment addresses the root cause when vertical jaw excess is the problem, though it takes months to complete and is typically the most time-intensive option.
Choosing the Right Approach
The best strategy depends on the underlying cause. If your teeth look short and your gums look puffy, gum contouring or crown lengthening is likely the most direct fix. If your teeth and gums look proportional but your lip pulls up too high, Botox offers a low-commitment starting point, while lip repositioning provides a more permanent solution. If your entire upper jaw sits too low, orthodontic intrusion may be the only way to address the structural issue. Many people have overlapping causes, which is why some treatment plans combine approaches.
For the simplest, zero-cost starting point, mirror-based smile training gives you immediate conscious control over your gum display. It won’t change your anatomy, but it builds a muscle memory that many people find genuinely useful for photos and daily interactions.