You may have heard that your eyes are the windows into your soul, but most people will remember the quality of your smile more than anything. Cosmetic dentistry gives you a number of options to improve upon the smile nature gave you. Some procedures simply make your teeth whiter, while others can address the pain of a missing tooth.
The more simple cosmetic dentistry procedures include teeth whitening or using white filling. The common denominator among these procedures is that they don’t alter the fundamental shape of your tooth, but just improve its color.
You have a choice of many different whitening options, some are even available over the counter. However, only the dentist provided whitening procedures can improve your teeth’s brightness and whiteness by a serious order of magnitude.
If your teeth discoloration is coming from old fillings, perhaps even metal fillings, you can get these replaced with white fillings. If you have a new cavity, you can make sure your original filling is white. White fillings help keep your teeth color consistent and more natural. It also helps hide your cavities from casual notice.
If you are interested in changing the shape of a tooth or teeth, cosmetic dentistry has various options for you. Depending on how much you want to invest and how great a change you want, you can opt for veneers, bonding, or crowns.
Bonding can be used to fix chipped or cracked teeth. It uses a soft resin that is attached to the chip or crack to fill it. The resin hardens like a plaster. Bonding can also make a tooth larger if you want to fill in a gap between a couple of teeth.
Veneers can also be used to fix the same dental issues. A veneer however is a thin ceramic shell that covers your entire tooth. Each veneer is custom made for each specific tooth. In addition to fixing the same issues as bonding can, it also reshape a tooth enough to improve a tooth’s alignment or whiten teeth so badly stained that traditional tooth whitening methods won’t work.
If your teeth have any decay or more structural damage, a crown is a thicker, more substantive type of veneer. Crowns are also created specifically for each tooth they are to cover, but are a fuller cap than the thin veneer. In some cases, if a few teeth all in a row need work, their crowns might be created as a single piece. In this case, the piece is called a bridge.
Even if you have no tooth to improve, cosmetic dentistry still has a solution for you. Dental implants can be inserted into your mouth where you’ve lost an entire tooth. Whereas all the other procedures need some tooth to rest on, a dental implant doesn’t. The implant itself is a titanium screw that replaces the missing, natural root. Then a custom crown or bridge is attached to the screw.
A local London Ontario dentist is dedicated to providing professional dental services such as dental implants in London Ontario and Snap On Smile in Ontario.