Hi, it’s Dr Michael Ghobrial here from Sure Dental at Wavell Heights in Brisbane.
Last Friday, I met a new patient, Travis. He lives locally in Clayfield and he wanted to talk about improving his smile and getting some veneers. During our conversation, he asked me, “Are my teeth going to become weaker if I get dental veneers?” And it’s a really good question.
I understand that you, as patients, want to improve your smiles but also don’t want to do anything that would adversely affect your dental health and structure. So I thought I’d make this video to discuss whether dental veneers actually weaken your teeth or otherwise
I guess it’s complex…The simple answer to that question is that well-done veneers that are well-prepared and well bonded on teeth that have been done conservatively do not weaken teeth. In actual fact, in some instances, veneers actually harden and stiffen teeth if they’re done with porcelain and bonded on well if a tooth is very minimally and carefully prepared. And so generally speaking, if a veneer is done well, your tooth will not be weakened.
However, that requires the veneers to be prepared very, very conservatively, leaving lots of your tooth enamel and lots of your tooth structure. And this really requires a pre-treatment mock-up where teeth are built up and the smile is tested to see how much tooth we can add to allow things to still look natural, but allowing us to be really conservative with our veneer preparation. The other thing is if you have a good ceramist, you can have a super thin veneer that is really, really rigid.
And so for some patients that actually have cracking and breaking down front teeth, porcelain veneers actually stiffen and strengthen their teeth. And in other patients it has a pretty negligible effect, it doesn’t make it stronger, nor it doesn’t make it weaker if the teeth are really strong. In the case of resin veneers, well they have no real effect, they don’t strengthen, and they don’t weaken. They can be used to build up teeth, but they don’t give that same stiffening effect as your porcelain veneers. And so, well done porcelain veneers, that are well-prepared conservatively can look really natural and beautiful, but can also not compromise the quality of the tooth.
But the big key thing is to match the appropriate treatment to the appropriate teeth. If someone’s got beautiful teeth, beautiful shapes and all that needs to be improved is colour, well then often whitening is a better option than veneers, but if porcelain veneers are going to be helpful and if they’re done well, they will not weaken the tooth structure.
If you’ve got any questions about your smile or about dental veneers, we’d be more than happy to help you organise a smile consultation, so we can take some photos and have a discussion about the pros and cons of any treatments you’ve been considering.
Simply visit our website at www.suredental.com.au and fill out the enquiry form, send us a direct message through social media or better yet give us a call on 07 3113 9698, and we will help you organise your consultation. I hope you found this video useful. See you at the next one.
