Gapped Front Teeth: Redoing Veneers

Hello, I'm Park Jonguk, director of Dream Dental Clinic.

When there's a gap between the front teeth,

the first treatment to consider is orthodontics.

The problem is that orthodontics isn't possible in every case.

Depending on how the bite meshes with the lower teeth,

whether orthodontics is feasible can go either way.

If the contact with the lower teeth is too strong,

full upper and lower orthodontic treatment would be needed,

and because of the time and cost involved, some patients choose veneers instead.

But if the teeth have already been treated with veneers or resin,

veneer treatment can be more effective than orthodontics.

Let's look at a case where the front teeth developed a gap after veneer treatment,

requiring veneer retreatment.

The four front teeth already had veneers,

but a gap had opened between them again.

In this situation, there were two esthetic problems.

First, the current veneers were already quite large,

and if they were redone after the gap opened,

the teeth would end up even larger,

and the angle of the teeth was tilted compared to the face as a whole.

Compared with the whole face, this was how tilted they were.

While correcting this tilted state,

we decided to redo the veneers to bring the tooth proportions closer to normal.

Using wax,

we redesigned the front teeth so they would look smaller.

We carried out veneer removal using a laser.

Veneers are typically removed by grinding them off,

and in that case, there's a high chance of damage to the tooth.

Using a laser to minimize damage to the tooth is extremely important.

This is the state after the veneers were fully removed.

Since a certain amount of reduction had already been done previously,

it was somewhat easier to adjust the tooth proportions.

We designed the front teeth to look noticeably smaller.

We brought out plenty of dimensionality in the teeth

and added translucency at the tooth edges as well.

When the proportion between the teeth improves,

the teeth also end up looking smaller.

The tooth surface isn't just left smooth either —

some texture is added to give it the feel of a natural tooth.

This is how we took veneer teeth that had developed a gap

and, while minimizing damage to the teeth,

redid them with a more attractive proportion — that's the process we've walked through.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic