Having missing teeth or gaps between the teeth can be humiliating and embarrassing. People with stained, rotten or gapped teeth often feel unwilling to talk or smile in public due to inferiority complex attached to imperfect teeth.
Dental veneers are a brilliant corrective cosmetic dental option that can bring beauty and strength to your deteriorated teeth more quickly and easily.
What is a Veneer?
A veneer, also referred to as a laminate, is a custom-designed fine shell of ceramic porcelain or composite resin that fits over the front surface of a tooth to restore its shape, size or color. Dental veneers, usually made out of tooth-like ceramic substance, are used to correct such imperfections in teeth as stain, crack, or chip. Veneers are an effective option for aging patients with unsightly or worn dentition.
Veneers are tailored to exactly match the size and shape of your tooth or teeth in question. They are also given a color that matches exactly the rest of your existing teeth. The shade, shape, and size of the veneer are normally prepared by a lab technician and delivered to the cosmetic dentist for placing over the patient’s tooth.
Unlike other cosmetic and restorative dental works like dental implants, veneers do not require removal of the damaged tooth or insertion of metal posts into the jaw bone for anchorage. A dental veneer works with the existing tooth, and is simply bonded to the front side of your teeth. It’s a completely tooth-borne procedure, so no drilling and no adhesives are required.
Types
There are a variety of different veneer types available in the market today. But the two most common types are porcelain and composite.
Porcelain veneers are small, wafer-thin pieces of porcelain that lay over the surface of your teeth, transforming the misshapen, chipped, crooked, stained or badly worn dentition into a brand new, straight, radiant smile.
Porcelain veneer process is not very cumbersome or technical. After a complete evaluation of your dentition, your cosmetic dentist will take an impression of your teeth and then sends it to a technician in a lab to have the veneer fabricated.
The most obvious advantage of applying porcelain dental veneer is that it provides patients with bright, straight, and ordinary looking smiles easily and painlessly by placing glass like ceramic porcelain on the tooth surface.
Composite resin is another material that is used for making cosmetic dental veneer. Composite resin comes in the same color as your natural teeth. This type of dental veneers does not involve taking a patient’s teeth impressions, and are not made by a lab technician. The dentist will shave the tooth enamel and then apply the resin material to the surface himself. These veneers can be repaired easily.
Composite veneers are thicker compared to the porcelain ones and generally less expensive than its porcelain counterpart.
Veneers are actually fragile until they are bonded or cemented to the teeth. Once cemented effectively, they will become as strong as or even stronger than your real, healthy teeth. The wafer slim veneers are extremely stronger and never or in a rare case become broken or chipped. With the firmly installed veneers, you can enjoy your all new smile and self-confidence. If taken proper care of them, veneers can last for many years to come.
Besides the type of material that veneers are made from, the overall cost of veneers also depends on the country where you live, the location of the clinic you choose to have the procedure, the qualification of your dentist, and the quality of the laboratory and the skill level of the technician who will fabricate the veneers using your impressions of your dentition.
