Veneers and Dental Crowns
by Dental Implants Sugar Land TX
Posted on 13-11-2022 02:34 pm
What is the difference between veneers and crowns?
And so I understand why it's a common question because it's the main two ways that dentists restore teeth and they're used kind of primarily for two different roles. So first would be the dental crown, so you've heard of that before, sometimes we call it a cap.
But a crown is something we use to restore the structure and strength of a tooth that is pretty badly damaged. An example of a crown would be something that typically wraps around the tooth and I've got a good example of that here. Let me see if I can zoom in and show you that. You can see it on my finger. Kinda, Sorta, not at all, okay there you go.
There is an example of a crown, if I were to spin that around you can see on all different sides it kind of wraps around the tooth.
The top of the crown would look very similar to a natural -- Let's see here if I can focus, oh yeah. The top of the crown would look very similar to the top of a natural tooth. So here's an example of a crown. We make these in our office in a single visit with a special type of high-strength porcelain, and we glaze them and customize them to bond to the tooth immediately.
If you are interested in changing up your smile and improving your smile, you may have heard of the term veneer. A veneer is mostly used to change the shape and the shade of a tooth permanently. We can do that with much less reduction and much less tooth removal. So you're able to keep more of your tooth structure and keeping your tooth stronger is a very good goal for us as dentists and it's one thing that we have a big advantage over when we do a veneer as opposed to a crown.
So if you're interested in having your smile improved you're gonna want to have a veneer done rather than a crown. An example of the reason why you might want a crown done in the smile area would be because you have a tooth that has many, many fillings in it or maybe it has decay and the decay is so large that a crown is needed, or maybe you had a root canal in that tooth, and because of the root canal, there is not enough tooth structure for a veneer to be successful and be strong enough.
Your dentist might recommend that you would need a crown rather than a veneer on a front tooth in case you had a root canal. A good example I'll show you of a veneer would be this little guy right here. And you'll notice there's some strain on the back side, that's purposeful. But we put that there to make it look even more natural.
But here's a veneer. So you can see that the back side of the tooth is gone. so you see that there? So it just covers the front side and it's a lot thinner and it's a lot smaller.
It's usually about a millimeter in thickness. On a model, I have a few models here, this is an idea of what a veneer might look like, on a model. This is a good example, see there? The tooth structure is still left on the backside. So a huge benefit there to a patient would be that when you chew, your bite, you're still able to hit on your teeth rather than hitting on the porcelain.
If you're hitting on the porcelain the dentist had to remove that tooth structure. There's another reason why maybe a veneer would be a better solution you have to remove a lot of tooth structure to do that.
So I think that kind of sums up the two different types of restorations, crowns versus veneers, and why one might be beneficial over the other. Probably looking at crowns for more of a cavity fix, more of a structural issue to the tooth. And then a veneer more for cosmetic, changing the shape or shade permanently.
And one huge advantage of a veneer over natural teeth is that veneers don't stain. So coffee, tea, wine, anything that would normally stain teeth, doesn't stain a veneer.
So that's kind of a nice benefit. Not gonna have to keep bleaching your teeth nonstop. So on that note, one reason why, why are so many teeth treated with crowns when a veneer would be a better-suited option for the patient?
And the reason why is that there's an issue with restoring temporarily a veneered prep. So if you are working on a tooth that you are minimally reducing and barely taking, maybe a credit cards width away, you can see how there could be a real issue here with how are we going to give you a few weeks, while a lab makes your permanent veneer and give you something at least is temporary for you? That is one huge advantage of getting your cosmetic dentistry done with veneers at Innovative Dental.
We utilize technology that allows us to transform a smile in a short visit, three and a half, to four hours. And we utilize technology that makes the veneers here, so there is no lab, so there is no temporary.
And because there's no lab, there's no temporary, we can be very conservative with your tooth and we have total control over the outcomes of your smile. Here I can hopefully illustrate the ways that Innovative Dental can restore teeth with same-day technology.
This is one of our four units that's capable of imaging teeth with this 3D intra-oral camera. And the wand here is going to capture 18 frames a second, and all of them are 3D. It's gonna build a 3D model on our computer here.
And that's what we use to design your crown or your veneer. And the first screen here, you'll see we can click on the proper tooth and tell the software whether we are doing a crown, an inlay or onlay, or a veneer, we can do bridge work, we can also do implants, but that's a whole different discussion. So here I've decided what a crown looks like, it's this tooth that I have highlighted right here, and then here's what a veneer looks like, and it's the little blue sliver you kind of see on the front of that front tooth. Let's go ahead and go to the area where I can show you the imaging and how that looks.
I think you will probably appreciate it, if you haven't seen this before it's cool. So this camera's already pulsating and taking a bunch of images, and now you can see it start to build a model. Isn't that cool? And this is how we're able to do crowns, veneers, bridges, implants. We utilize it for Invisalign therapy, so we straighten teeth. We don't take your typical impressions anymore because of this technology.
So it's really neat, right? So the days of impression material and gagging and passing out in the dental chair cause you are trying not to swallow the impression material, those days are gone at Innovative Dental. So that's one thing we think is pretty cool that we've invested in for our patient's benefit. We can skip ahead here, I wanted to show you this is what the model would look like, if I can get rid of these screens, and here is the model of the teeth I just imaged. Isn't that neat?
We can design on this your veneers and crowns. And then we're able to send them to one of our four milling machines. So that's how that process works. If you thought that was pretty cool and interesting and might be a game changer for you and your, maybe, dental phobia or the way that you've had dentistry given to you in the past, we would love the opportunity to meet you and discuss how we can help you with your smile.
If you're wanting to transform your entire mouth and to full mouth rehabilitation, we can do that too with implants, and crowns, bridges, veneers. Whatever's best for you and we go over all that in a very comfortable environment here at Dental implants in Sugar Land Tx. You can give us a call here at our office, we'd love to speak with you.