VENEERS

Porcelain Veneers: The Basics

Dental veneers are porcelain facings that are bonded to teeth to correct undesirable shape or color. They are a great way to improve your smile for patients whose teeth are stained, chipped, or have gaps.  Damaged teeth can look flawless after just a few visits. We use two different kinds of porcelain in our veneers: feldspathic porcelain and e.max.  

Prosthodontist Dr. Malkin

With well over a decade of experience, Dr. Malkin creates long term roadmaps for patients detailing every procedure that could be done now and in the future to improve one’s smile.

Typical Dental Veneer Procedure

Veneers are usually installed for aesthetic reasons, so the first step of the process is to sit down with the patient and talk about their aesthetic goals, what kind of smile they want to achieve. Visual aids help here – Dr. Malkin encourages patients to bring old pictures of themselves when their smile was at their best, or else maybe bring a picture of a celebrity’s smile that you want to emulate. After this initial consultation, we’ll inform you of all the fees associated with this procedure, so you won’t be surprised by anything later on. 

We’ll take pictures of your teeth from many different angles, which will help us determine what kind of structure will look best. We’ll also make a mold of your teeth and take some other measurements. All these pictures and measurements are sent to the dental lab. Here, a mock-up of the veneers is created that can be presented to you as a sample. For some patients, this mock-up can even be placed in their mouths to provide an extremely accurate projection of what their appearance will look like post-veneer. 

The next step is for the patient to come in for the actual procedure of preparing for veneers. Depending on the amount of teeth that are being worked on, this can take quite some time. We can arrange for an anesthesiologist to come in for patients who are anxious about drawn-out dental procedures, and we also offer sleeping pills at no charge as a more affordable form of sedation. Nitrous gas is available as well. To prepare for dental veneers, a small amount of natural tooth material has to be removed. After that, temporary veneers are placed on the teeth. These temporary veneers are made based on the lab mock-up, so they look very closely to what the final veneers will look like. 

In 3 days to a week after applying temporary veneers, once all numbness has worn off, the patient returns and we take pictures of how the temporary veneers look and record any thoughts or concerns the patient has with the veneers at this stage.  This information is used to improve the final veneers. It takes about 2 to 3 weeks for the dental lab to fabricate final veneers. The patient is numbed again, and then the final veneers are tried on.  Here, the patient gets one last chance to note any changes they want to make. When the patient is happy, the veneers are cemented. In 2 to 4 hours, the final veneers are set and the process is complete.

The Pros and Cons of Lumineers

Tribeca Advanced Dentistry doesn’t use Lumineers because we believe the drawbacks outweigh their advantages in most cases.

Veneers vs. Crowns

Dental veneers are sometimes called partial crowns, depending on how much structure needs to be replaced. What exactly is the difference between a veneer and a crown? To understand that difference, fist you have to understand how a tooth is composed. Each tooth has 5 surfaces – the biting surface, and the 4 sides of exposed tooth around that biting surface. The difference between veneers and crowns is that veneers replace 2 sides of the tooth, while crowns cover up more surfaces. 

One way to think of it is that veneers replace 180 degrees of a tooth, while crowns replace all 360 degrees. Crowns are also made of e.max, and we often use them in conjunction with e.max veneers to restore multiple teeth at once. Dental technology is advanced enough today for many crowns and veneers to be placed at the same time and blended to the point where you can’t tell the difference between a set of natural teeth and a set of altered teeth.