Dental veneers are thin, tooth-coloured shells your dentist can permanently attach to your front teeth. These veneers can make your teeth appear straighter, longer, shorter, less pointed, whiter or smoother, and they promise to cover a range of cosmetic issues on your front teeth. However, teeth veneers are more than just a cosmetic improvement to your smile. They can also be an investment into your long term financial health. Here's a look at how:

1. Smiling is important in job interviews.

If you are not confident about your smile because of cracked, crooked or discoloured teeth, you may be hesitant to smile at a job interview. Unfortunately, that blunder can cost you the job, and in fact, analysts identify not smiling as the third most common interviewing mistake made by job seekers.

The first two mistakes are failing to make eye contact and not knowing about the company for which you are interviewing. If you are meeting with someone about a job, front teeth veneers may give you the confidence boost you need to smile through the process.

2. White teeth have been linked to hiring.

Even if your teeth are relatively perfect based on culturally normative standards of beauty, if they are not white, that may affect your chances of being hired. In fact, one study showed that after having their teeth whitened 58% of participants received job offers and 53% received raises.

Additionally, nearly two-thirds of study participants with whitened smiles were viewed by the interviewers as more confident and out-going than participants who had not had their teeth whitened. As front teeth veneers can make your teeth appear whiter, this is another way they can help you.

3. Bad teeth are linked to all kinds of social biases.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of biases around "bad" teeth. For example, many cartoons depict buck-toothed characters as unintelligent or people with big teeth as sinister. Those seemingly innocuous characterisations can bleed into society and affect how you are perceived based on your teeth.

4. Business involves a lot of first impressions.

Even once you are hired to a job, you likely have to deal with a lot of first impressions. For example, regardless of what you do, you may have to speak with customers, clients, co-workers, managers, vendors or others on a regular basis. If you have a straight, healthy smile thanks to good luck or front teeth veneers, you increase your chance of making a positive first impression. That can affect your sales, how customers and clients perceive you, your likelihood of advancing and many other things.

If you are thinking about getting front teeth veneers, remember it's not just about improving your smile. It's also about investing into your financial future.