Details About Dental Veneers and the Procedure to Place Them

What are dental veneers? 
Essentially dental veneers are an extremely thin piece of porcelain, which is used to replace the damaged enamel on your teeth. The porcelain is so thin that these dental veneers take on some of the qualities of enamel, including being extremely hard. The device is extremely flexible and can be made in any shape and size.  The shading can also perfectly match your teeth. They are placed onto the teeth with the help of dental cement and the bonding helps them to be extremely strong and durable. The veneers are very natural looking, and since they feel exactly like your teeth many of our patients even forget that they have veneers.

How are dental veneers placed?

While it is true that dental veneer are some of the most versatile solutions available, and it is also true that the vast majority of people can get them placed with no problem, we prefer to leave no stone unturned. So the first step for your dental veneer placement is a consultation and examination. During the examination portion, we will thoroughly inspect your mouth to make sure that you are a good candidate for dental veneers, and also to make sure that there are no underlying problems. If there are any issues, we can fix them before proceeding to the next step in placing your dental veneers. We also will do a complete consultation so that we can be on the same page as you regarding your goals for the dental veneers and how they fit into the overall picture of improving your smile. We can conduct a smile analysis to determine how your smile looks now, and how you want them to look in the future.

In order to properly place the veneers, we will need to shave a tiny amount of your enamel off of your teeth. This allows us to place the veneers flush with the rest of the teeth so that they fit right in with the rest of your mouth. Once done, you will wear temporary veneers while the final ones are created in the lab.

We will place the dental veneers in a second appointment which is focused on the fitting and placement of the veneers. We will spend this appointment fitting the veneers so that it is the right size and shape, ensuring that it is perfectly placed so that your bite is not affected and match the color with your regular teeth. After all these elements have been met, we will use dental cement to adhere the dental veneers in place for strength and stability.

How are dental veneers best used?

The most common use for dental veneers is to fix minor breaks, cracks, and chips in the teeth. Since there is not a lot of invasive drilling involved, this is often the preferred solution to dental crowns, which require a larger portion of the enamel to be removed. Porcelain veneers are also used to correct the appearance of teeth, both for their alignment and for whitening. Sometimes the teeth do not respond well to traditional peroxide based whitening and using veneers to replace the upper layer of enamel and give you perfectly white teeth has grown in popularity.