Thin facings bonded to the front teeth to change their shape, shade and alignment.
Overview
A veneer is a thin shell — porcelain or composite — bonded to the front surface of a tooth. It changes the colour, shape, length and apparent alignment of the teeth appreciable when you smile.
It is a cosmetic treatment, not a functional one. Veneers mask problems rather than correcting them: they can make a slightly crooked tooth look straight, but they do not move it or change your bite.
Suitability
If one of these suits you better than dental veneers, we will say so at your consultation — including when the right answer is to do nothing for now.
Step by step
Photographs, a scan and a discussion of what changes you want. We design the proposal digitally and show it to you.
The design is checked directly on your teeth so you can see and approve it before anything irreversible happens. We strongly recommend this step.
A thin layer of enamel is removed — usually less than half a millimetre — and a Digital scan is taken. Temporaries are fixed.
Veneers are made and characterised to your approved design.
We check a trial, of the shade match and morphology with you, and only after approval, bond them permanently.
Benefits
Changes colour, shape and apparent alignment in a small number of visits
Porcelain resists staining better than natural enamel
Closes small gaps without orthodontic treatment
Digital design lets you approve the outcome before getting done
Composite options are reversible and repairable
After treatment
Who will treat you
MDS · MNDC (New Zealand) · MADC (Australia) · PGDAI (CIIOMFI, France) · Fellow ICOI (USA)
Dr. G. Vijay Srinivas is an Oral & Maxillofacial Pathologist and Implant Dentistry practitioner with more than 35 years of clinical experience, and the founder of AP Superspeciality Dental Hospitals.
Full profileWhere
Questions
Porcelain veneers are not. We remove a thin layer of enamel to make room, and enamel does not grow back — that tooth will need a veneer or crown on it from then on. This is the single most important thing to understand before starting. Composite veneers and minimal-prep options are far more conservative.
Porcelain typically 10 to 15 years; composite 4 to 8. Grinding is what shortens both. When a porcelain veneer eventually fails it is replaced, not removed — the tooth underneath has been prepared for it.
Not if they are designed well. Natural teeth are not uniform, not perfectly white and not identical — veneers that ignore that read as obviously fake. We design to your face and age. If you want the very white uniform look, we can do it, but we will tell you honestly how it will read.
Yes. Veneers do not respond to whitening agents, so we match them to your teeth as they are on the day. If you whiten afterwards, your natural teeth will lighten and the veneers will not — leaving a mismatch. Whiten first, settle for two weeks, then shade-match.
If your teeth are genuinely misaligned, orthodontics corrects the problem; veneers hide it while removing healthy enamel. For mild irregularity with a sound bite, veneers are a reasonable cosmetic shortcut. For anything more, we will recommend aligners or braces instead.
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