Every course I run has someone in the room who got on a plane to be there. Delegates have come from Norway, Italy, Germany, Brazil, the United States, Dubai and Thailand. They land at Heathrow, they spend a week in Knightsbridge, and they fly home with something they could not have got from a screen.
If you are thinking about doing the same, the honest question is not whether hands-on veneer training in London is worth it. It is what the week actually involves. So here it is.
The three days are not three days in a row.
This is the single most important thing to know before you book flights, and it is the thing overseas dentists most often miss.
Designing Smiles runs over three days, but not consecutively. You are in clinic on the Monday and the Tuesday, and then again the following Monday. The February 2027 course, for example, runs on the 1st and 2nd of February, then the 8th.
There is a clinical reason for the gap, and it is the whole point of the course. The teaching is built around one real patient having a complete smile makeover, and all six appointments of that case happen across the three days. The Monday is the consultation, records, photography, preparation and temporaries. Then the laboratory needs time to make the definitive veneers, properly, which is not something worth rushing. The following Monday is the fit.
Compress that into three consecutive days and it stops being a real case. It becomes a demonstration.
Let me be clear about how it is taught, because it is the question I am asked most and courses vary enormously on this. I do all of the treatment on the patient myself. You are beside me for every stage of it, in a small group, close enough to see what my hands are actually doing. Your own hands-on preparation is done on models alongside the case.
That is a deliberate choice, and it has a practical consequence worth knowing before you book anything: you do not need to be registered with the GDC to attend. You need a dental degree. For a dentist flying in from abroad, that is usually the sentence that decides whether the trip is possible at all.
So you are in London for a week.
Which is rather the point. You are in clinic on the Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday through to Sunday is yours, then you come back in on the Monday for the fit.
Most delegates flying in treat those middle days as a holiday, and I would encourage it. Some stay in London. Others use the time to see more of Europe while they are this close to it. Paris is a train journey away. Italy, Spain and Switzerland are a short flight.
If you have travelled a long way to be here, it seems a waste to spend the gap in a hotel. It is a good week to bring someone with you.
If you do need to fly home in between, the third day is a fixed date, so book around it rather than hoping it can move. There is a patient waiting for it.
What you are actually getting?
Ten delegates, and no more than ten. That is a practical constraint rather than a selling line: there is one patient and one chair, and ten is the number of people who can stand close enough to actually see what is happening.
Twenty hours of verifiable CPD. If you are registered outside the UK, check recognition with your own body before you travel rather than after.
The only entry requirement is a dental degree. You do not need to have placed veneers before. Some people arrive having done hundreds of composite bonding cases and no porcelain. Some arrive having done neither and simply know this is the work they want.
And a complete smile makeover, consultation to fit, on a real person rather than a case presentation. Records, photography, preparation, temporaries, lab communication, artistic recontouring, occlusion, then the fit itself. Watching a case run from the first conversation to the final photographs is a different kind of learning from seeing the middle of one on a slide.
Current dates and full details are on the course page.
Two practical things worth sorting early.
Check your visa position as soon as you have a date in mind. Requirements vary by country and they change, so give yourself weeks rather than days.
Bring your loupes if you work in them, and bring a camera you already know how to use. The photography we cover is far more useful when you are learning it on the kit you will be picking up again on Monday at home.
The part nobody plans for..
Here is what happens about three weeks after you fly home.
You are back in your own surgery, in your own country, and someone sits down in your chair who is right for veneers. You have the technique now. What you do not have is the person standing beside you who has placed over fourteen thousand of them.
That gap is real, and it is where course training quietly disappears. You learned it, you did not use it soon enough, it faded. I have watched it happen to good dentists more times than I would like.
It is the reason I run a mentorship alongside the courses rather than instead of them. And it is the reason every Designing Smiles delegate gets their first month in it included with the course. Not as a discount. As part of what you booked. The month after you fly home is precisely when you need someone, and I would rather you already had it than found out later that it existed.
It is fully online, so where you live stops mattering the moment you leave London. You bring your own cases and we look at them together, at whatever stage you are stuck. Live calls run at 7pm BST and every one is recorded, so members in other time zones watch them when it suits.
Members already join from all over the world. Several came to a course first and stayed on afterwards, which is the order I would recommend if you can manage it.
A note on timing,
Ten places, twice a year, and the courses do fill. The autumn 2026 dates have already gone. If international travel is involved, book the course first and the flights second, not the other way round.
Is the trip worth it?
I am not going to tell you that a course changes your career. Courses do not change careers. What changes things is whether you walk back into your own surgery and actually do the case.
Come to London, stand beside a full case from consultation to fit, prep alongside it until the sequence is in your hands, and then keep a line open to someone once you are home. That combination is what makes the training hold, and it is why the trip is worth building a week around.
