Can Minimal-Prep Veneers Really Look Beautiful?

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

Even today, a lot of people still think minimal-prep veneers are a "bad" treatment.

About a decade or so ago, many clinics

went too far, treating cases that weren't even good candidates,

and reduced teeth heavily in the process,

and the resulting side effects were reported in the media.

Celebrities who had received the treatment also

spoke about various side effects,

and the treatment ended up with a variety of negative reputations attached to it.

Is a veneer really that bad a treatment??

I think about this a lot myself.

A patient who came in recently also assumed that veneers always come with a lot of side effects

and that it's a treatment that harms tooth health.

Minimal-prep veneers

aren't a bad treatment that harms tooth health

as long as an accurate diagnosis minimizes any side effects that could arise after treatment.

What matters here

is how little the tooth is reduced.

The more tooth structure is removed, the more side effects increase.

In other words, if the tooth isn't reduced at all, side effects are minimized to that same degree.

In cases where a no-prep veneer is possible like this,

the teeth can be made beautiful with almost no side effects.

The teeth were quite small, with gaps between them,

and the length was also too short.

On top of that, these were what we commonly call inward-angled teeth.

They were tilted inward.

For a no-prep veneer to be possible, three conditions are needed.

The teeth need to be small,

the alignment needs to be good,

and they shouldn't be protruding.

This case matched all three of these conditions well.

First, we carry out the diagnosis for treatment.

In a case like this, where the proportions of the teeth aren't good,

the proportions need to be changed to be as close to average as possible.

Since the teeth were short, they looked wide from side to side,

and with gaps between the teeth on top of that,

doing veneers as-is would make the teeth look even wider.

To solve this problem, gum reshaping is performed.

This process trims away only as much gum tissue as won't cause any problems for gum health.

In this case, even after trimming the gum, the physiologic space needed was still maintained,

so there was no problem for gum health at all.

Since this was a case of deep overbite, where the tooth covered the lower tooth substantially,

the length itself couldn't be extended,

making gum reshaping the best approach for this case.

This process of anticipating the result

is called a wax-up precision diagnosis.

It's the single most important step in a no-prep veneer.

After anticipating the result this way,

we proceed with treatment.

No tooth is reduced — only gum reshaping is performed.

After the gum reshaping, the teeth look cleaner and more open, don't they?

The ratio between tooth length and width matters this much.

This is how it looked a week later, after the gums had stabilized.

From this state, an impression is taken and fabrication of the minimal-prep veneers begins.

After the no-prep veneers were fabricated,

we took photos with the veneer placed on just one side at a time.

You can see that it looks even more natural and beautiful than the original tooth.

You can also see that it wraps well around even the sides of the tooth.

Even though the ceramic is this extremely thin,

a variety of natural tooth characteristics are still expressed in it.

No-prep veneers are usually made about 0.1 to 0.7mm thick,

and since many are made from a single material,

the result tends to end up white and unnatural,

but Dream Dental Clinic's minimal-prep veneers

combine various materials even while remaining thin,

and are made in multiple layers,

so the natural look truly comes through.

Without reducing the tooth at all,

the minimal-prep veneers were completed

in this beautiful shape, natural and lovely.

Natural beauty is precisely Dream Dental Clinic's greatest hallmark,

and it's something no one else can match.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic