Orthodontics is one of the few crafts that works on a face while the face is still being written.
Almost everything else in appearance is applied to a finished surface. Hair, clothing, light, makeup, even most of surgery, arrive after the architecture is settled. An orthodontist treating a child is working on a structure that is still growing, still deciding on its proportions, and will carry that decision for sixty years. Very few people get to make a mark that permanent, and fewer still stop to ask what right they have to choose the direction.
Dr Blend Hussein Balisany asks it out loud.
He is a specialist orthodontist with a PhD, based in Erbil in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, founder of the SAF Oral Rehabilitation Center and Dentistry Programme Director at the School of Medicine, University of Kurdistan Hewler. His clinical work concentrates on the growth and development of the face and jaws in children, and on a question that gets far less attention than it deserves: whether a result still holds years after the braces come off.
His way of framing the work is the reason he belongs in this project.
He describes orthodontics as a way to support the natural balance and harmony of a face, rather than to impose an ideal on it. That sentence sounds mild until you notice how much of the appearance industry is built on the opposite instinct. A template exists, the face is measured against it, and the gap between the two becomes the treatment plan. Balisany starts at the other end, from the face that is actually there, and asks what would let it settle into its own proportions.
This is the same argument LOOKS has been making from a different direction.
Attractiveness is not a scale from beautiful to ugly with everyone anxiously placed somewhere along it. It is coherence: a face, a body and a manner that agree with one another. A technically flawless result that has nothing to do with the person wearing it reads as a parody, and people detect that instantly even when they cannot name what is wrong. An orthodontist who treats harmony as the goal, rather than a set of target numbers, is protecting something the patient could not have asked for by name.
He is also careful about what the profession is allowed to claim.
Balisany pays close attention to how orthodontic knowledge is taught and to keeping public statements about malocclusion aligned with the evidence. That discipline costs something. It is easier to sell a treatment as a fix for a person’s whole life than to say precisely what is well documented: bite function, oral health, the development of a child’s face and jaws, the aesthetics of a smile, and the confidence and social ease that come with them. Restraint of that kind is not caution, it is respect for the person receiving the information.
A face is a long game, and so is a reputation.
The teeth move in months. The judgement about whether the change was worth making arrives decades later, delivered by someone looking in a mirror who has long forgotten the appointments. Working with that timescale in mind, and refusing to promise more than the evidence carries, is a rare combination. We are glad to have his voice in the film.
Sources: biographical material supplied by Dr Blend Hussein Balisany, September 2026; University of Kurdistan Hewler faculty profile, ukh.edu.krd