Smile Makeover Principles

With a beautiful and bright smile you feel confident, attractive and optimistic. Your smile conveys friendly personality and self-assurance. People are lured to you and respond positively. Besides the physical appearance, an attractive smile has many added benefits. It impacts your emotionally and psychologically. A cosmetic dentist in Charlotte, NC specializes in smile makeovers and can help you achieve your ultimate goal of a magnetic smile.

Dental Bonding—What is It All About?

Dental bonding is a procedure used for a variety of circumstances to make teeth more aesthetically pleasing. Basically, a tooth-colored resin is applied and hardened with a special light that bonds the material to the tooth.

Why Would You Seek Dental Bonding?

As one of the easiest and most inexpensive cosmetic dental procedures, dental bonding is used to correct a variety of imperfections. These include:

• Repair of decayed, chipped or cracked teeth
• To improve appearance of discolored teeth
• Close spaces between teeth
• Make teeth look longer or change their shape
• To protect portions of tooth roots exposed when gums recede

How Bonding is Done

Your dentist will select the color of the bonding material to match your teeth. Little preparation is required except for gently abrading or roughening the surface of the teeth involved. The resin is molded or smoothed into the proper shape after which it is trimmed and polished to match the rest of the hard tooth surface. Bonding takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes per tooth.

Advantages and Drawbacks

When compared with veneers and crowns, the procedure for dental bonding removes the least amount of enamel from the tooth. In addition, unless bonding is used as a filling, anesthesia is usually not required. On the downside, the bonding material may not be as strong as regular tooth enamel, even after it hardens, so it is more prone to chipping and staining in comparison to your natural teeth or veneers and crowns.

Dental Veneers: Composite and Porcelain

Dental veneers can be thought of as a layer or shell of porcelain or composite that is created to be the same color of the tooth, and designed to fit over it perfectly. This is for the purpose of improving the tooth’s overall appearance as well as correcting certain conditions, such as uneven tooth alignment or spacing, discoloration, tooth enamel deterioration, chips or cracks, or unsightly fillings.