Natural Front-Tooth Veneers: Retreatment for an All-Ceramic Crown

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

Aesthetic treatment of the front teeth

is a very demanding process.

These days, in nearly every field, AI and computers are taking over work that people used to do.

Dentistry is no exception.

In a great deal of prosthetic fabrication,

design and processing are now being done by computer.

CAD/CAM is used not only in dentistry but in many other engineering fields as well,

referring to a fabrication process of computer-aided design

and computer-aided manufacturing.

In dentistry, it has been actively adopted for more than 10 years now,

and a great many areas are now fabricated using CAD/CAM.

But this kind of automated fabrication method

has many advantages when it comes to replacing the functional side of dental technology,

but in the aesthetic domain, it's still several steps behind, at a level that falls well short.

Even so, because of how simple and cost-effective it is to fabricate,

many clinics are using this same CAD/CAM even in the aesthetic domain.

Veneers that are usually finished in a day, or in 2 to 3 days,

go through this same computer-based fabrication process.

In my view, it's still too early to bring this into the aesthetic domain.

So we still fabricate aesthetic restorations by hand.

But not every hand-made veneer or all-ceramic crown

is actually aesthetic.

This is the state of two front-tooth crowns.

To give translucency to the tooth tips,

you can see various design touches applied through the hand-fabrication process,

but even so,

you can see that just these two teeth look quite awkward.

The hand-fabrication process is very demanding,

and requires considerable skill.

In the choice and application of materials,

and in the design and technical fabrication process,

this is a field where skilled, specialized personnel are essential.

To retreat just these two awkward teeth

and transform them into natural, beautiful teeth,

we carried out a wax-up precision diagnosis.

The teeth next to the two front teeth, the lateral incisors, were very small,

so looking at the proportions before retreatment,

the ratio of the front teeth's length to width made them look too wide and splayed out sideways,

and the ratio between the front teeth and the lateral incisors meant the front teeth couldn't help but look relatively too large.

Bringing this proportion closer to average required a variety of approaches.

Retreating just the two front teeth

to change this proportion into a more average one is not an easy task.

Through retreatment,

it changed dramatically into this natural-looking result.

If you only saw this photo, even a dentist would probably find it hard to tell which tooth is the all-ceramic crown and which is the natural tooth.

While incorporating various design elements into the tooth shape to make it look smaller,

we kept a natural overall form,

and at the tooth tips, to let the feel of a natural tooth truly come through,

we gave it a sense of translucency.

Even viewed from the side,

you can see that the natural look has been well expressed.

While matching the color and shape of the natural teeth well,

we also created a better overall proportion.

Retreating an existing awkward veneer or all-ceramic crown while bringing out this kind of natural feel

is a very important part of aesthetic treatment. And naturalness is Dream Dental Clinic's greatest hallmark and strength.

Natural beauty

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic