Transform Your Smile with Beautiful, Custom-Crafted Veneers
Veneers can be used for a few different things. It can help improve the color of one’s teeth. It can also improve maybe the size or the shape.
So looking at veneers, we do have situations where we don’t need to remove any tooth structure at all, and we are just adding to the tooth. We’re making it slightly larger. We may be able to change the color a little bit in that instance.
We have other cases where we need to change the color more drastically. That case is a little bit more expensive. We are having to take some of that tooth structure, but we’re able to improve things a little bit more in those cases.
We’re getting it to the ideal size, shape, and the color that that patient’s looking for. When a patient’s looking into improving their smile, whether they know from the start they want veneers, or they’re not quite sure how to get where they want, we like to have a really thorough conversation. We use something called a smile guide, and it shows very fine differences in teeth, whether the edges are more rectangular in shape, or is there a slight curve? Patients usually don’t know what the difference between the photos would be, but their eyes kind of gravitate towards one that they like, and so then we can talk about those really minor differences and figure out what it is they’re looking for.
We may ask them to find photos of smiles they do like. What do they like about it? Sometimes patients are just thinking, okay, well, if I’m doing this, I’m going white, white, white. Then we also have a conversation.
Are we doing just the top teeth, or are we also doing the bottom teeth? Because we don’t want that imbalance either. It’s also a little trick that we’ll use where you kind of want to match that tooth color to whatever the whites of their eyes are, and when you point that out to a patient, they start seeing that. Like, you know, I saw someone the other day, and that didn’t match, and it catches their eye then.
So it’s just sort of educating them on what are we looking at? How do we fine tune it? You kind of bring them to find that conclusion with you. It’s sort of a journey together. The other moment I think that patients start realizing maybe what color they are looking for is when they’re in their temporary or provisional veneers.
So typically in these cosmetic cases, while the lab is fabricating or making their veneers, they’re wearing temporary veneers. And they’re a nice color. They’re never paper white.
They’re a nice color. And sometimes patients realize like, oh, I like this color. And it tends to be a more natural tooth color.
So they sometimes just figure it out themselves along the way.