One of the most frequent questions our patients ask us is: How can I improve my smile? Among the many problems that we can have with our oral health, there is a section, aesthetics, which today is of utmost importance.
When a patient has dark colored or stained teeth, small fractures, slight malpositions… and therefore does not like their dental esthetics, we have a series of possible treatments that we can perform, among them, ceramic veneers or full veneer crowns.
What are the differences between ceramic veneers and crowns?
Ceramic veneers are thin sheets of ceramic (between 0.3 and 0.7 mm. thick approximately) that cover the most anterior face of the teeth and their most incisal area, that is to say, the tip of the teeth. The thickness will depend on many factors, such as the color to be masked, the malposition to be corrected or the defect to be improved. In the great majority of cases, we have to reduce the tooth in order to be able to make the veneers, even if it is only a small amount. In very few cases, always slight, it is not necessary to touch the surface of the teeth. Therefore, ceramic veneers are a very conservative treatment, keeping most of the tooth intact and without affecting the survival of the tooth.
Ceramic veneers are made on all those teeth that are visible in the smile, normally from fang to fang or from first premolar to first premolar, both in the upper and lower arches. As we can see, ceramic veneers are not made on molar areas, which require other types of treatments.
In some cases, and less and less, veneers are not the treatment of choice, requiring full veneer crowns.
In which cases do we need full veneer crowns?
There are times when the destruction of the tooth is very great, the patient is already wearing crowns and now, for different reasons, they need to be changed, etc. In these cases we are forced to be a little more aggressive with the treatment.
As we have seen with veneers, by lowering the tooth very little, we maintain the dental enamel, that is to say, we conserve the hardest and outermost part of the teeth, the enamel. In the case of crowns, regardless of the material we use, we have to remove all this outer layer of the tooth and reach the inner part, what we call dentin. In the crowns we have to reduce all the faces of the teeth, not only the most anterior and the tip. In this case, we can make crowns on our molars, not being limited to the anterior teeth.