One of my team member is going to get married this year.
She has terrible composite veneers. So I wanted to give here a great smile.
Lets look at the photos here (you can see more by clicking left and right)
These composite veneers were done by a well known dentist in the UK.
What do you think?
There are a number of things that are wrong here, the most obvious to me is how they all just look too square and uniform.
Its like the dentist has no eye for detail!
Now, I suggested that we remove the composite and replace it with porcelain - thinking that they were full coverage composite, but what I discovered was that they are not full composite veneers, they were in fact just edge bonding.
This is what things looked like once we removed the composite.
They don't look too bad at all here, right?
They are shorter than the premolars, and that's creating a slight reverse smile line.
The reason that she had the work done originally was because she felt that her teeth were too round.
Also, she really disliked the UR2, which looks like its flared outward.
I was prepared for porcelain veneers, but after taking everything off the natural teeth, we had another discussion.
I spoke about the options, and honestly thought I could do better with just bonding.
Years of doing smile designs freehand gave me the confidence to do this smile freehand, and it took about 90 minutes (incl. removing the old composites)
This is the end result, and I will explain what we changed:
The most obvious thing is the change in the incisal length.
This was achieved by adding a little incisal length, mainly to the centrals. We levelled the length of the teeth.
The effect of doing this was to correct the reverse smile.
Also the bottom edge of the teeth are not perfectly straight. Natural teeth have some curvature, and the mesial and distal edges of the incisors are also more curved than before.
Note the patient wanted less curved teeth, but we still need to add a level of curvature to them to keep them looking natural.
The laterals are now shorter than the centrals, and the way we got the axial inclination was by adding to the neck and distal of the laterals.
The incisal edge was in a good position, its the rest of the tooth that didn't look that great.
If we were going to do porcelain veneers here, then there would have been some prep involved, which I would not have been super comfortable with.
Also, to keep things minimal or no prep, with porcelain, the smile would end up becoming wider, and if you look at the smile photos, I think the width of her smile is not too bad. If I made it wider, there is a risk that she would look "all teeth."
It is true that composite will not age in the same way as teeth, and this may need replacement sooner, but I still think this was the best choice here - even though I hardly ever do composite veneers!
For the polishing, I used a combination of soflex discs and Asap wheels.
I have only just started using these, and they are very good for composite and for polishing the fit surface of temporary restorations on implants.
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