Goodbye to the lab-coated nerd; welcome the dentist as hip celebrity. Ouch!

Framed in the waiting room of Drs. Marc Lowenberg and Gregg Lituchy is a New York magazine cover, with their photograph, touting a listing of "The 100 Best Dentists in New York." It's a fake, a spy magazine parody from 1991, when the idea of celebrating dentists still seemed ridiculous.

"Because who would care?" Dr. Lowenberg said. He and his partner show off the cover at their Central Park South practice as a reminder of how far their profession has come in the last eight years.

Now, people do care about dentists, especially cosmetic dentists, who promise yet another form of makeover by whitening, straightening or substituting inferior teeth with million-dollar — or at least $20,000 — smiles.

This booming business has made its most skilled, or best-known, practitioners not only rich, with incomes up to seven figures, but quasi-famous. The old stereotype of the dentist as bland, lab-coated nerd has been elbowed aside by an aggressively mediagenic new breed eager to do some image polishing.