I’ve been reading a lot about cosmetic veneers on the internet this past few days, and there’s actually a lot of misinformation about porcelain veneers. I noticed three things that kept coming up again and again in terms of what porcelain veneers are, and I’m going to debunk all of them for you.
Now, the first myth would be that porcelain veneers are damaging, and we have to file a lot of your teeth, or shave your teeth away. That’s not entirely true. While we sometimes need to potentially reduce a little bit of tooth structure to allow the teeth to fit in nicely, there are a lot of times where we can actually do “prepless veneers” on your teeth. What this means is that your teeth aren’t shaved on at all, all we need to do is potentially roughen the service a little bit with a tool, and the porcelain is going to stick on straight away. This means that there’s no damage, or minimal damage, to your teeth, if it’s done in the right way. Now, to do that, of course we need to pre-plan it, your dentist has to pre-plan it. You need to have the blueprint or a draft of what your teeth look like, because without any of those test drafts or trials, chances are your teeth will be trimmed or shaved a lot more than what is needed.
Myth number two, porcelain veneers will fall off easily. Now, porcelain veneers in general, once they’re cemented onto your teeth, should not fall out. In fact, I’ve seen porcelain veneers staying on in a patient’s mouth for 20, 25 years, or longer. If it’s done properly and the cementation process is done to the point where it’s perfect, where there’s no moisture, no saliva, and no bleeding around the gums of the cementation, during the cementation process, chances are they will stay a long time. Remember, porcelain veneers are thin. You can get porcelain veneers as thick or as thin as 0.3 millimetres. By itself, it’s like an eggshell, it’s really thin, flimsy, and easily breakable. But when it’s cemented on a hard substance or hard structure, it’s firm as anything. So it actually mimics the texture and your teeth. It’s like if you put tile on a floor, if you don’t cement the tile on a rough surface and you step on the tile, it will break and crumble very easily, because it’s not cemented on. But once you cement the tile on a nice flat surface and you stomp on it, well it’s going to be a hard time getting the tile to be cracked, or getting the tile cracked, unless you use a hammer or something really hard! So, once a porcelain veneer is cemented onto a hard structure and cemented well, it will not fall off.
Myth Number three is that porcelain veneers look very fake. Now, that’s a misconception again. If you pre-plan the case, or the dentist pre-plans the case really well, porcelain veneers can look extremely natural. This comes down to the quality or the experience of the dentist, the experience of the ceramist, and the dental team. To make something natural out of porcelain is very difficult, especially when you have prepped this veneer where you actually don’t trim your teeth at all. Making that look really natural is quite a task. So, the experience and the creativity of the dentist and the dental team would actually be paramount to achieving a nice, natural smile. If you look at a dentist’s website, you may find some porcelain veneers look a little bit more unnatural, and in some places, you might find more natural teeth. So, be sure that you do your research in terms of where you want to go. Have a look at the before and afters so that you are well aware of what the style of the practice is.
There you have it — the top three myths debunked, and hopefully we’ve helped you with going through all this, so that you don’t have to go through the internet all the time!
