This is a procedure called "full mouth rehabilitation" for someone whose bite is totally messed up (in my case, I should have had braces when I was young, but my parents couldn't afford them). By capping all my teeth and replacing them with a personalized sculpture, the dentist elevated my bite, corrected my over and underbite, corrected a whole gaggle of other alignment problems as well as deeply stained teeth worn down to the dentin. Some of my new teeth had to be L-shaped to achieve this. We had a conversation about the color of my caps, how he had done tests to make sure they would be the right shade to accent my facial skin tone, neither disappearing into the shadows nor shining like "chiclets."
One of the first and most memorable comments I got from another man, someone who had never paid much attention to his own appearance, was: "Seems like for that kind of money he could have got them a bit whiter." To this day this seems to illuminate the way these displaced hillbillies regard body modification; anything worth doing is worth overdoing to show you have the means to do it. If someone finds out you spent $40K on a facelift, this reasoning goes, it had damn well better be something people notice even if it makes you look like an alien race from Babylon 5. Looking different -- like you got something noticeable for your investment -- is more important than looking good by any standard metric of "good."
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