The 101 on Crafting the Perfect Smile with Dental Veneers

You can change composites but you’d have to clean it; you don't want to stick new ones on old composite. Problem is there is no way for patients to approve a design if you are making a lot of changes. I am personally dissatisfied with composite veneers. Most of them who did it years ago have replaced almost all of them with porcelain.

They don't stain. I had a patient who’s a heavy smoker, his veneers were extremely white. They don't stain easily. Biting-wise, your veneers covered teeth are stronger than natural teeth. Eating-wise, eat normally and avoid hard food like crab claws.

You can’t because you shave the teeth down. The process is to reverse it and anyway if you have straight teeth now why would you want to change it to crooked teeth again? The removal process for replacing is tedious to replace 6 front veneers. I would probably set aside 6 hours.

You can correct it up to a point, you need to shave more of the tooth and if you shave too much you might actually hit a nerve. There are cases where we need to shave a significant amount and we may have to do a root canal treatment. That might sound extreme but consider other methods for extracting teeth for braces or for false teeth, maybe it won’t seem extreme after all. Perhaps it just needs a bit more work to achieve the desired results.

Different porcelains account for how they are actually made. The design is interesting. I think I'm one of the few dentists who predesign smiles for patients to approve. We use a 3D design, I then add and sculpt the wax to create the smile as an initial proposal to the patient.

There is some shaving of the teeth. I would say 99% do not require anesthetic while very few cases do. We classify veneers as minimally invasive dentistry. There is not much trimming of the teeth. What I will tell my patient is I will shave as much as necessary but as little as possible.

Let me give you an example, we had a lady who did her veneers 11 years ago. She was running after a bus and tripped, falling faceplanted to the ground. She then came to see me expecting to replace the veneer but it was not badly broken. In such cases, we can repair the veneer and it might not require replacement.

Depending on the style of the dentist. It depends on the dentist; I do believe in a natural look when it comes to veneers, but if patients want Hollywood teeth I would do it.

It depends on how overcrowded the teeth are. There are cases where you do have to perform extractions just to make space or to get the best result. However, it is not common in our practice to extract teeth, we are able to do it without extracting in some cases.

In general American dentists tend to claim 10 years. We have very few patients that need replacing in that time. Looking at patients from 17-18 years ago most veneers are still looking good.