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Meet the Doctor | NYC Invisalign Specialist
Home / Meet the Doctor | NYC Invisalign Specialist

››› Meet the doctor

Meet Dr. Courtney,your NYC orthodontist

Hi there! 👋 I’m Dr. Courtney Barry, a board-certified orthodontist and the founder of Smile Pop, my clear aligner and facial aesthetics practice at 76 Madison Avenue in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan.

I do the things I genuinely love: clear aligners, teeth whitening, Botox and microneedling. In fact, I do every single service we offer on myself.

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Central Park · 4th of July

Dr. Courtney Barry with her husband Matt and their four young children, holding American flags at a Fourth of July celebration in Central Park, New York City

My fam celebrating the July 4th in Central Park

Credential
Board-certified orthodontist
Treats with
Invisalign, Angel and Spark aligners
Smile Pop founded
July 2019
Location
76 Madison Ave, NoMad, Manhattan
Patient rating
5.0 stars on Google and Yelp
Fun fact
I love to shred the pow 🎿 (I’m an avid skier!)
Follow me
@drcourtneyortho for me, the fam, & the honest version of running a practice + raising 4 humans in NYC
Follow the practice
@smilepopnyc for all the teeth stuff: transformations, aligner tips, whitening and everything in between

››› A little about me

I’m living my dream,and that didn’t happen by accident

I grew up on a 49-acre farm on the south side of Chicago and came to Manhattan for my orthodontic residency.

I was supposed to leave.

Instead, I fell in love with New York and decided the city could use a little Midwest charm. 😉

After residency, I spent years working in different practices, with different doctors, in different states. I loved orthodontics, but I kept feeling like something was missing.

So I stopped waiting for someone else to build the practice I wanted.

I built Smile Pop.

Smile Pop opened in July 2019, and I’ve been building it around a pretty simple idea ever since:

I want to be the best part of a person’s day and make each day feel like a blessing.

That isn’t just something we say at Smile Pop. It’s genuinely how I want people to feel when they walk through our door.

I want you to leave feeling a little more confident, a little more cared for, and hopefully with a reason to smile.

Dr. Courtney and Matt on their wedding night, walking through a tunnel of sparklers held by their guests
The night we got married (during the height of COVID!)
Dr. Courtney and her husband Matt sitting together on a bright orange beach car
Matt (my hubby & the love of my life) + me
Dr. Courtney and Matt with their four children on the beach, all in matching red and white stripes
The Barrytimes (our family unit nickname ☺️)

››› The other side of me

I’m also a wife, a mom,and a professional chaos coordinator

My husband, Matt, and I have four beautiful kids, all born through surrogacy after years of pregnancy loss and eventually a stillbirth. But we believe every child truly is a blessing from God.

We kept every single one of our surrogacy pregnancies a secret.

Our kids are close together in age, our New York City apartment is loud, and our life is completely crazy.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

That journey changed the way I see a lot of things. It made me appreciate how much can be happening underneath the surface of someone’s life, things you would never know just by looking at them.

So if you’re going through something hard, especially infertility, pregnancy loss, or grief, I want you to know that you aren’t alone. I’ve shared more of our story here.

Dr. Courtney pushing a double stroller through the snow in Manhattan with her four children Tap to play

See me in action

Dr. Courtney walking into the room where Matt is holding their newborn, the moment they surprised everyone Tap to play

Our first surrogacy reveal

Dr. Courtney on the beach holding one of her babies, answering a critical comment about her family Tap to play

Ignoring the haters

››› The orthodontist part

I am a little obsessedwith teeth

Okay, maybe more than a little.

I spent 11 years after high school becoming an orthodontist: college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, dental school at Southern Illinois University, a one-year orthodontic internship at the University of Florida, and a three-year orthodontic residency at Montefiore in New York, which I completed in 2014.

I’m also board-certified, which means I chose to have my finished cases evaluated by a panel of orthodontic examiners after completing my residency training.

School taught me how to move teeth.

But experience taught me how to see them.

After residency, I traveled regularly to Birmingham, Alabama to learn under my mentor, Dr. David Sarver. He completely changed the way I looked at orthodontics.

Instead of starting with a set of teeth and trying to make them fit together, he taught me to start with the face.

How does the smile look when you talk?

When you laugh?

How does it fit your lips, your facial proportions and your overall appearance?

That philosophy still influences every case I treat today.

››› How I work

Clear aligners,done properly

Clear aligners are my tool of choice, and I am very, very particular about how they’re used. I’m really good at using them, and I design the most beautiful smiles that look good today and as you age.

To put it in the simplest of terms, clear aligners are just a bunch of force vectors being applied to teeth. Knowing how to do it and what can biologically actually happen is the hard part.

👆 This part matters because faces change. Tissue sags, bone remodels, and the lower third of your face loses support as you age. All of that gets factored in when I treatment plan. And I’m obsessed.

Between the aligners themselves and a few auxiliary helpers (like attachments, elastics, IPR, teeth manicuring and reshaping, mini screws, etc.), there’s very little I feel I cannot treat. I even treat orthognathic surgical cases with clear aligners (I work with amazing surgeons!)

Invisalign, Angel and Spark are all clear aligner brands I use. I use all 3 because I don’t believe there’s one magical aligner brand that is right for every patient.

The ✨magic✨ is in the planning.

Aligner treatment done casually is easy to spot. Aligner treatment done meticulously is a completely different thing, and the difference is in the details most people never see, like where the buttons sit for elastics and how the refinements get sequenced at the end. I personally treatment plan every case. I don’t hand your smile to software and hope for the best.

Finishing a case is the hardest part. Pushing teeth around in the beginning is easy. Getting it all to come together and stabilize properly is the hard part.

Clear aligners may look simple when you put them in your mouth. Designing them well is anything but.

More thanjust adults

I also see children as young as 7, typically for early orthodontic evaluation and Invisalign expanders.

If you’re a parent wondering whether it’s too early to have your child looked at, it usually isn’t.

Sometimes the smartest orthodontic treatment is knowing when to watch.

And sometimes it’s knowing when to intervene.

Either way, I would rather take a look and tell you honestly what I think than have you spend years wondering whether you should have come in sooner.

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››› Why I built this

I want to be the bestpart of your day

I built Smile Pop from nothing, and I do every single service here on myself. The aligners, the whitening, the Botox, the microneedling. I am not going to sell you something I would not sit in the chair for.

Our mission at Smile Pop

At Smile Pop, we are a culture of service. We strive for clinical excellence, outstanding customer service, and a great patient experience. At Smile Pop, we want to be the best part of a person’s day and make each day feel like a blessing.

I want everyone to shine their light and feel like the most confident version of themselves, and I know that starts from within. Straight teeth don’t magically fix your life. But sometimes getting rid of one thing you have been self conscious about for years is enough to make you smile a little bigger, take a few more pictures, speak up in the room, or stop thinking about your teeth altogether.

You cannot pour from an empty cup. So I work hard and I play hard, I love my life and I live it all the way, and I try to sprinkle that onto everyone I meet.

Dr. Courtney Barry in her white coat at the Smile Pop studio in NoMad, holding a puppy
Fun fact: we sometimes call Smile Pop “Smile Pup.” Our patients love to bring their furry friends with them, and we welcome them with open arms.
Dr. Courtney as a young girl in the early 1990s, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a red holiday cardigan
That’s me, glasses and all. My orthodontist growing up managed to make me, looking like this, feel like a rockstar. That’s what I want to do for you.

››› Because I could not find one I liked

I built the whitening line I actually wanted

I kept sending patients out to buy whitening products, and I kept hearing the same two things: “it doesn’t really work,” or “it hurts.”

That is the whole problem with whitening. The gentle stuff is too gentle to do much. The strong stuff makes people so sensitive they quit halfway through. Either way you end up with a box in a drawer and the same shade of teeth.

So I made my own. Smile Pop teeth whitening products allow you to whiten at home, and you can reorder any time at shop.smilepop.com.

Want your brightest, whitest smile in one visit? For a wedding, a photoshoot, a vacation, or any big event, we whiten in office using our own formula, compounded for us at a pharmacy.

Book whitening Shop whitening

››› Our community outreach

Smiles of Faith

Let all that you do be done in love.

1 Corinthians 16:14

My faith is an important part of who I am, and Smiles of Faith is where that shows up most visibly at Smile Pop.

Every holiday season my patients, family and team pack comfort tote bags and hand them out to people living on the streets in New York. It has grown every single year, and anyone is welcome to come.

Learn more about Smiles of Faith
A large group of Smile Pop patients, families and team members in hot pink beanies outside the studio on Madison Avenue, holding pink Smiles of Faith tote bags

››› The things people actually ask

Questions I getevery single week

Why see an orthodontist instead of a dentist?

Every orthodontist starts out as a dentist. Dental school is the same. The difference is what happens after it.

An orthodontist completes a full time orthodontic residency, which is 2 to 3 more years spent on nothing but moving teeth, planning bites, and studying how faces grow and change. Mine was 3 years at Montefiore in New York.

A general dentist is legally allowed to offer aligners without doing that residency. This is not a knock on dentists, and I work with wonderful ones. It is simply that orthodontics was one piece of their training and it was all of mine.

What does board-certified actually mean?

Finishing residency is what makes someone an orthodontist. Board certification is a separate, voluntary step on top of that, and it means choosing to be examined on your actual results.

After my residency I had my own finished cases evaluated by a panel of orthodontic examiners, who looked at how those smiles genuinely turned out rather than at what I said about them.

It is the difference between being allowed to move teeth and choosing to be judged on how well you do it.

Do you do braces?

Smile Pop runs on clear aligners: Invisalign, Angel and Spark. That is a choice rather than a limitation, and I would rather be excellent at one thing than adequate at two.

Come in and I will tell you honestly what I think your case needs.

Do you treat kids?

Yes. I see children as young as 7, usually for Invisalign expanders. Parents, if you have been told to wait until all the baby teeth are out, it is still worth having someone look now. Early treatment is often about guiding how the jaw grows, and that window does not stay open forever.

I started Invisalign in another city and just moved to NYC. Can you take over?

Yes, and this is a big part of what we do. New York is full of people who started treatment somewhere else and got stranded mid-case. Bring whatever you have, including trays, records and your last scan if you can get it, and we will work out where you are and what it takes to finish properly.

Are you in network with my insurance?

No, we are out of network, and that is worth two minutes of your time to understand rather than treating it as a no.

Out of network means we do not contract with insurance companies and do not negotiate our fees with them. It does not mean your insurance is useless here. Many orthodontic plans include out-of-network coverage, and if yours does, we will look up your benefits and help you file.

We do not collect your payment. Your insurance sends it directly to you, like a rebate check. And any time you need help filing or following up on a claim, ask us and we will help you. You are not alone in that part. The squeaky wheel gets the grease when it comes to insurance. 😉

Head over to our check your insurance page and we will find out what your specific plan does. Or text us and we will look it up.

››› Word on the street

What patients say

Live from Google and Yelp, pulled straight through Trustindex. Nothing here is hand-picked by us.

››› Come find me

Two places I actually post

Come inand meet me

A consultation is a real conversation about your teeth, what bothers you, and whether I am the right person for it. No pressure, and no judgment about how long it took you to get here.

New patients welcome, and so is anyone already in treatment elsewhere who wants to transfer to Smile Pop. We do not discriminate. 😉

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