The Many Benefits of Dental Veneers

Dental Veneers Longing for a Hollywood smile? Veneers just might be the answer for you. Veneers are a common cosmetic dental procedure that have the power to utterly reinvent your smile. Here at Washington State Prosthodontics, we’ve enhanced hundreds of smiles using beautiful porcelain veneers.

How Do Veneers Work?

A dental veneer is a thin shell that covers the front of your tooth. Using veneers, cosmetic dentists are able to achieve amazing results, creating smile transformations that change chipped, stained, and crooked teeth into a perfectly white and beautifully balanced smile.

How is it done? Veneers are made of either porcelain or a resin composite material and shaped and colored to mimic the appearance of natural teeth. Your teeth are prepared by shaving just a little bit of the enamel, and then custom-shaped veneers are permanently bonded to existing teeth.

It’s important to understand that modern veneers are very different from what they were years ago. Back in the early days of veneers, it was necessary to shave down the teeth very closely in order to make space for dental veneers. Today, veneers can be about as thin as a contact lens, requiring very minimal tooth prep--or sometimes even none at all! This means a less invasive procedure that often doesn’t even require anesthetic, but still gives you the beautiful results you want.

Veneers can be administered to just one tooth in order to correct a single flaw, or placed on all the front teeth in order to create a total smile makeover. Are you considering veneers? Here are some of the advantages that they could bring for you:

Instant Results

Have you ever watched a makeover show where they completely reinvent someone’s smile overnight? Well guess what--that’s done using veneers! Usually, the process of getting veneers takes just two visits: one to get an imprint of the teeth and craft the veneers, and the second to place the veneers on your teeth.

This means that many dental issues you may have which could otherwise take months or even years to correct through whitening and orthodontia are almost instantly transformed into your ideal smile using minimally invasive veneers. Dr. Ogata a Maui dentist adds that because of how quickly veneers can transform your smile, veneers have become a very popular cosmetic treatment.

Function Just Like Natural Teeth

Veneers are not the same as false teeth. While dentures, implants, or bridges can replace missing teeth, veneers instead improve the appearance of the teeth that are already there. You might think of it as simply dressing them up a little. This means that the underlying tooth is still present and that spaces between teeth are maintained, allowing you to floss, brush, eat, and talk just like you normally would.

Additionally, the material used to create veneers closely imitates the functionality of natural teeth. Veneers are strong and hard enough to allow you to treat them just as you would your normal teeth, although we might advise you to avoid some foods that could cause staining more easily on your new veneers, such as blackberries or dark tea.

Close Gaps and Chips, and Hide Wear

As we age, or smiles tend to acquire some wear and tear. This could be evident in the form of worn-down edges of teeth, or small chips on the corners of your incisors. You may not even notice these issues until you look at an old photo and see that your teeth used to look quite different. For some of us, there may even be an unsightly gap between two teeth that was never corrected. Veneers immediately correct these problems, providing coverage where you need it and smoothing over rough edges.

Whiten Teeth

Want beautifully white teeth? Veneers are kind of like slipping on a new skin for your teeth. Although we carefully design veneers to look perfectly natural, we also make them look like the very best version of natural. That means that you can instantly have a beautifully white, bright smile.

Add Volume

As we age, our teeth, along with the skin around our lips, lose volume. This makes our mouth look more pursed and our smile look slightly sunken. Most dental veneers are very thin--significantly less than the width of a fingernail. However, if you prefer to add some volume to your smile, veneers can be custom made to restore dental support for your lips and give you a more youthful appearance.

Choose the Style You Want

At first glance, it’s tempting to think that there’s just one perfect smile. However, that simply isn’t the case! When you look closer, you notice that there’s as much variety in people’s teeth as there is in any other part of us. Individuals may have rounded or squared-off teeth, prominent canines, or perhaps more pronounced incisors, or maybe a fairly even look all around. It’s amazing what a difference each of these small elements of your smile can make to your overall appearance. In fact, in some cases, the term “designer smile” is used to refer to a smile makeover that’s not necessarily done to correct flaws, but rather to adopt a specific desirable style of smile.

Veneers allow you the freedom to do just that.

Call Us to Learn More

Here at Washington Prosthodontics, we provide more than dental prosthetics. We also perform state of the art cosmetic dentistry¹. Cosmetic dentistry is an exciting and rewarding field because it’s as much art as science, and we’re able to carefully craft exactly the right smile for you. However, our background in prosthodontics also allows us to bring into consideration the healthy balance of the bite and smile, thus giving you beautiful results that also feel great and contribute to overall dental health.

In our office, veneers can sometimes be part of a more extensive smile makeover that could include dental implants, dental prosthetics, and treatment with oral surgery to restore the function and appearance of your smile. Veneers allow us the freedom to create a balanced overall look that helps your new prosthetics blend into the rest of your smile.

Questions about veneers²? Give us a call to learn more, or to schedule a consultation³ today.