About

A magazine for people who’ve been quietly covering their teeth.

Smile Proud started because dental writing on the internet is either terrifying (before-and-after horror stories) or terminally boring (“10 tips for a whiter smile”). Neither of those things helped anyone stop covering their mouth.

This is meant to be the third thing. Something you’d actually read with your coffee. Essays about confidence, culture, transformation, and the strange class politics of American teeth — alongside straight-shooting information about what modern dentistry actually costs, where, and why.

A woman writing at a sunlit desk

What we’re trying to do here.

01

Editorial, not clinical.

We write like a magazine, not a dental office. Essays, cultural criticism, and the occasional real interview — not thin listicles pretending to be journalism.

02

Honest about money.

Modern cosmetic dentistry costs a lot in the US and much less almost everywhere else. That’s not a scandal, it’s a fact. We say it out loud and then help you think it through.

03

Never fake.

No fabricated testimonials, no invented statistics, no AI-slop headshots pretending to be real patients. When we don’t know something, we say so.

Who’s behind it.

Smile Proud is published by Scout Theory LLC, a small independent publisher based in Columbus, Ohio. It’s part of a family of health and travel titles that includes Colombia Medical, Colombia Dentist, and Dentist For Less.

We’re opinionated about what makes for a good dental experience, straightforward about what things cost, and skeptical of anyone selling you an outcome that sounds too clean to be real.

How we make money.

Smile Proud is free to read. When readers decide they want to actually do something — get a consult, compare prices, book a trip — we sometimes earn a small referral fee from the participating clinics and platforms we send them to. It never costs the reader anything extra, and it never changes what we’re willing to say in an essay.

If we’re recommending a place, it’s because we’d send our own sister there. If we’re not recommending a place, that’s worth noticing.

A note on Colombia.

You’ll see Colombia come up a lot in these pages. That’s not accidental. Colombia has licensed dentists whose registration can be checked through the public ReTHUS system, while prices and treatment scope vary by provider and case. For larger cases, some patients find total costs lower than comparable US cash-pay treatment in the US. It’s not the only good answer to expensive American dentistry. It just happens to be one we know very well.

We’ll always tell you when a story is about Colombia specifically versus dental care in general. Everything else is meant to be useful no matter where you decide to go.

Your smile is not vanity. It’s voice. This magazine is for people who’ve been quiet about theirs for too long.

Get in touch.

If you have a story you want to tell, a question you want answered, or a bone to pick with something we wrote — say hello. Every message reaches a human.