Tanglewood Dental Associates

Tanglewood Dental Associates Dr. Lawnin exhibits care and compassion to people in Tanglewood, Memorial, Galleria, and Houston area

Tanglewood Dental Associates offers expert dental care in Houston. Dr. Lawnin and Dr. Korloo provide smile restoration, same-day crowns & personalized treatment.

07/30/2026

Nicole Kidman's smile has a longer backstory than people think. Old photos show a noticeably gummy smile, the kind where a lot of gum tissue shows when she laughs. At some point that changed. Lip repositioning, maybe some Botox, maybe just time working in her favor.

Here's the part worth knowing: a high smile line was never the actual issue. Showing gum tissue is normal for plenty of people and isn't something that needs fixing on its own. What tends to matter more is whether the tooth shapes and edges still look like teeth, not like they got smoothed out on an assembly line.

She kept some of that natural edge detail. That's the part we'd pay attention to before the gum display.

Where do y'all land on this one?

The polaroid wall keeps growing. Patients, staff, the people who've been part of this place for years. Some of these sta...
07/24/2026

The polaroid wall keeps growing. Patients, staff, the people who've been part of this place for years. Some of these started as consultations and turned into something closer to family.

07/21/2026

Midline's correct. Central dominance is right, the front two teeth doing what they should. Canines are fine. The laterals are where it gets busy, they're sized to fill something out instead of matching what was already there, and the edges read as more rectangle than tooth.

Natural teeth have contour. These read like something was placed on top of hers rather than shaped from hers.

The rating: 4/10.

She was told her only option was veneers.Tetracycline staining does that. An antibiotic given young leaves a gray-brown ...
07/17/2026

She was told her only option was veneers.

Tetracycline staining does that. An antibiotic given young leaves a gray-brown band baked into the enamel, and normal whitening bounces right off it. So that's what she was told: veneers, all the way across.

We tried something else first. Eight weeks of at-home KöR whitening, tracked against a shade guide the whole way. C4 to this. Not one tooth was trimmed.

Veneers are still the right call for plenty of people, cracked teeth, a broken bite, years of wear ground down. But tetracycline staining is one of the few things whitening can actually solve on its own now.

Ever been told something was your only option and it wasn't quite true?

07/14/2026

I hear "I don't have time for a cleaning" more than almost anything else in this office. I run the practice and I still get mine done on schedule. That excuse doesn't hold up, and here's why.

A cleaning isn't upkeep. It's the appointment where we catch the stuff that doesn't hurt yet. Early bone loss, a cavity starting under a filling, gum recession before you'd ever notice it yourself. None of that shows up because you brushed well that morning. It shows up because someone looked.

Skipping it doesn't save you time. It just moves the time to later, when the fix is bigger and the visit is longer.

Time-lapse is me, in the chair, this week.

If your dentist can't make time for their own cleaning, why would they expect you to make time for yours?

Every week, a patient of mine stands in front of 400 to 500 people and talks for close to an hour. He's a pastor. Most o...
07/09/2026

Every week, a patient of mine stands in front of 400 to 500 people and talks for close to an hour. He's a pastor. Most of what he says gets recorded and posted online for people who couldn't make it.

For years he thought people were watching his teeth instead of listening to him. He called it a mind game: convinced there were flaws in his smile that, most of the time, weren't even there.

That's not a vanity problem. That's a confidence problem, for someone whose job is standing in front of a room and being watched closely, on camera, week after week.
The actual issue was structural, not cosmetic. Staining built into the tooth itself, plus a bite that needed straightening before we touched a single crown. We fixed the foundation first, then the crowns.

I see a version of this often with the professionals who come through my door: lawyers arguing in front of juries, executives presenting to boards, people whose smile is doing work every day whether they think about it or not. The self-consciousness is rarely about vanity. It's about being fully present when everyone's attention is on you.

07/07/2026

Madonna's smile isn't perfect. It works because it fits her face. Her teeth follow the same line her face already makes instead of fighting it, and that's the part most people miss when they think about a "good" smile.
Get that wrong and you get the opposite: teeth pointing one direction, face going another. Doesn't matter how straight they are, it never reads right.
Full breakdown and the score in the video. Who should I look at next?

A waiting room isn't the interesting part of a dental office. Everything above the ceiling and behind the walls is.When ...
07/02/2026

A waiting room isn't the interesting part of a dental office. Everything above the ceiling and behind the walls is.

When we expanded, most of the real work went into things patients will never see: plumbing, electrical, suction, all run before a single chair went in.

Building a dental office turned out to be a lot closer to building a restaurant than a typical office buildout.

The visible changes were driven by decisions further back:

We mill and print our own crowns and veneers in-house now, so we needed more lab space and more equipment to run it.

Same-day restorations mean patients wait while the mill runs, so we built that wait to feel like a hotel lobby, not a row of chairs against a wall.

Larger restorative and cosmetic cases deserve a real conversation in a quiet room, not a hallway consult, so we added private consultation spaces.

Some patients want quiet. Others want the background hum because it keeps their mind off the appointment. We built for both.

None of it was about looking impressive. It was about the office finally working the way we actually practice dentistry now.

More room. Same team. Same approach we've had for 66 years in Houston.

06/30/2026

Negative four. That's the grade.

Tom Cruise, Days of Thunder. The midline drifted clean off toward his ear, and somebody just let it ride.

This was never a veneers problem. It's an orthodontics problem. Move the midline back where it belongs, build the smile on a foundation that's actually centered, then place the restorations. He had the budget for that. He picked speed.

Cheap and fast over right. Every time.
What would you have done differently?

06/19/2026

You think the dentist is the expensive option.

The bacteria behind gum disease don't stay in your mouth.

They enter your bloodstream. They've been found in arterial tissue, in heart valve tissue, in brain tissue alongside the proteins linked to Alzheimer's.

People with untreated gum disease carry two to three times the cardiovascular risk of people without it.

The research keeps turning up the same pattern across heart disease, stroke, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer.

A twice-a-year cleaning and check-up is not a cosmetic expense. It's the cheapest intervention in a very long chain of expensive ones.

The bill lands somewhere. The question is where.

Address

1800 Bering Drive #825
Houston, TX
77057

Opening Hours

Monday 9:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 7:30am - 3:30pm

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