Must-Know First Aid for a Dental Emergency
Dental emergencies can strike suddenly, and knowing what to do in those critical first moments can help save a tooth and prevent serious damage. Whether
Dental Veneers
Veneer teeth can improve the appearance and strength of your front teeth, giving you a straight, white, beautiful smile you can feel proud to share with the world. If you’re looking for natural-looking veneers in Santa Rosa, you’ve come to the right place.
Porcelain Veneers in Santa Rosa
What Teeth Issues Can Veneers Fix?
Veneers can correct a wide range of aesthetic issues. They can bring balance and harmony to your smile by improving the size, shape, proportions, and shade of one or more teeth.
Can Veneers Improve the Health of Your Smile?
Veneers don’t just look great–they serve a functional purpose as well. They can strengthen weakened teeth and support your natural enamel. This is especially important for decayed, cracked, and thin teeth.
What Are Prepless Veneers?
Our office has advanced digital scanners that enable us to create no prep veneers. These veneers come with the advantage of matching up to your existing tooth and don’t require the removal of any enamel.
Are Teeth Veneers Right for You?
Feeling confident in your smile can completely change how you interact with the world. Imagine showing your full smile in photos with loved ones, speaking with confidence in professional settings, and not holding back when you laugh because of how your teeth look.
Dental veneers can improve your smile by correcting several different types of issues, including:
- Chipped or cracked teeth.
- Teeth that are too thin and appear gray at the edges.
- Undersized and misshapen teeth.
- Small gaps and misalignment issues.
- Discoloration that can’t be treated with teeth whitening.
- Dental restorations that don’t match the rest of your smile.
- Root canal treated teeth that have become discolored.
- Certain types of decay and acid erosion.
What are dental veneers, anyway? They’re thin shells of material, usually porcelain or ceramic, that completely cover the visible surface of the teeth that show when you smile. They’re also a conservative and effective treatment that can create an ideal smile and stabilize types of dental health issues such as enamel erosion and decalcification.
In our office, we use two types of veneers: porcelain and composite. Which one is best for you depends on your individual smile goals and dental health status. Our skilled team will fully explain why they recommend one or the other for your specific needs.
What Is the Process Like?
When applying teeth veneers and other dental restorations, such as crowns, we have to remove a small amount of tooth enamel or tooth structure to allow for proper dental bonding and to create the appropriate shape for the restoration. Porcelain veneers have the advantage in this area over a dental crown, as they require less reduction of the tooth, thanks to how thin they are, as well as the fact that they only cover part of the tooth.
For porcelain veneers, we use a dental lab where each new tooth will be custom-made to meet your specific needs and match your natural teeth. In many cases, we can place a temporary veneer while you wait for the final versions to arrive from the lab.
Other types of veneers can be crafted right here in our office while you wait. For example, CEREC uses specialized ceramic materials to craft same-day veneers on our premises without sending your case to an external dental lab.
When they’re ready, we’ll bond your veneers firmly to your natural teeth. You can expect porcelain veneers to last for many years with good care. Thorough dental hygiene and proper home care are important to prevent your veneer from stains and discolorations. While normal brushing and flossing won’t damage your veneer, we do recommend using a non abrasive toothpaste.
What Are the Different Types of Dental Veneers?
Veneer teeth come in several materials, each of which have their own pros and cons.
Porcelain Veneers
Porcelain veneers are made from a glass-like ceramic material, which is thin and inflexible, yet very strong. It provides a look that closely matches your natural tooth color & translucency and is stain-resistant to maintain its beauty over time. There are different types of porcelain veneers available, depending on your dental needs.
Typically, the porcelain is fused to a durable metal base. While this approach can produce a lifelike refreshed smile, newer materials look more like natural enamel and aren’t as bulky as traditional porcelain veneers.
Ceramic Veneers
While porcelain veneers have been around for decades and still prove to be an excellent option for restorations, advances in machining and dental technology have also now made it possible to create veneers with other new types of ceramic materials.
Full-ceramic veneers have translucency, shine, and luster that’s closer to natural enamel without sacrificing the quality and durability of your restorations. They’re an effective way to correct damaged enamel, bad staining or misshapen teeth.
Prepless Veneers
Prepless veneers are a modern, appealing option for many people. With traditional veneers, a small amount of the tooth surface often needs to be removed to allow for good bonding between the veneer and your tooth enamel. If enough enamel needs to be removed, you must always have the veneers or other restorations throughout your lifetime in order to protect the dentin or interior layer of the tooth.
Prepless veneers don’t require the irreversible step of enamel removal and can be done without removing any tooth structure. Prepless veneers are still made of thin porcelain or other ceramics, and applied to the surface of the teeth, but the bonding process does not require any structural removal in most cases.
There are exceptions when your dentist is working to correct misshapen teeth, as sometimes a new shape is needed to make effective use of the veneer. But in general, prepless veneers work to strengthen teeth, improve appearance, and alter the color, size and shape of teeth.
Creating prepless veneers is possible only with modern digital scanner technology, which allows our office to take extremely accurate images of the contours of your teeth. We work with an excellent dental lab to custom-mill each prepless veneer using the best technology to ensure a perfect fit with the underlying tooth.
Composite Veneers
If you’re not sure whether or not veneers are right for you, we can craft immediate veneers with durable composite resin, the same material we use to create tooth-colored fillings.
While composite veneers don’t have the same shine or longevity as ceramic veneers, they’re a great option for young people who aren’t good candidates for permanent teeth veneers, as well as anyone who would like to try veneers before committing.
Contact Our Office Today
As always, our team will ensure you understand all your options and help you make a fully informed decision about how to get the best results for your smile goals.
All of the veneers we offer are high-quality, and which one will work best for you is an individual matter. Talk with Dr. McCormick to find out more about whether veneers may be right for your dental needs.
Meet the Santa Rosa Dentists Dedicated to Giving Your Smile the Personalized Care It Deserves
About Dr. Andrew McCormick:
Dr. Andrew T. McCormick is a native Californian originally from Monterey County.
In January 2010, he became an accredited member of AACD, one of 350 dentists worldwide, after extensive work to raise his level of expertise in cosmetic and rehabilitative dentistry.
Voted Best Dentist in Santa Rosa by Readers of Bohemian Magazine
1 of 350 Dentists Worldwide Accredited with the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry
About Dr. Austin Griffith:
Dr. Austin Griffith, DDS, is a highly skilled Santa Rosa dentist with over 13 years
practicing general dentistry. He has expertise in restorative dentistry, prosthodontics, oral surgery, TMD/TMJ treatment, and emergency care. He has also experience with Invisalign® clear aligners, implant restoration, and sleep dentistry. With a patient-centered approach, he prioritizes building trust, using humor to ease anxieties, and educating patients about their options.
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