Front-Tooth Veneer Treatment for a Peg Lateral and Oversized Teeth

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

Front-tooth veneer treatment is a form of esthetic tooth reshaping.

It reshapes the tooth — much like reshaping the eyes or nose,

it's one method of reshaping a tooth.

An all-ceramic crown is another method of esthetic tooth reshaping,

but that method requires much more tooth reduction,

so it's used when a tooth is badly fractured, has very severe discoloration,

or has decay too extensive for a veneer to handle.

In other words,

a veneer is the method that reshapes the tooth while keeping tooth reduction to a minimum.

This kind of front-tooth veneer treatment doesn't reduce every tooth by the same amount.

The amount that needs to be reduced differs from tooth to tooth, and even from spot to spot on the same tooth.

And naturally, when a tooth that starts out large needs to be made smaller,

the amount of reduction is greater,

whereas when a small tooth needs to be made larger,

there's almost no reduction needed at all.

Cases with such varied tooth sizes and shapes, on top of complex, varied dental alignments,

have to be diagnosed precisely, one tooth at a time.

In this case, the two front teeth were quite large,

while the tooth beside them (the lateral incisor) was quite small,

so we decided to proceed with treatment

to improve the shape and alignment of the teeth using veneers.

Since the bite was in an open-bite state,

we also had to think through how to handle that at the same time.

We carry out a precise diagnosis while building the treatment plan.

One of the teeth had already been treated with a crown.

For the two peg laterals, we planned to make the teeth larger with veneers,

for one front tooth, to make it smaller with front-tooth veneer treatment,

and for the tooth that already had an all-ceramic crown,

to redo it with an all-ceramic crown so it would harmonize with the other teeth again —

treatment proceeds separately for each.

We use wax to build a preview of how the treatment will look beforehand.

In this process, how much to reduce each individual tooth

is all decided in advance.

This photo is after removing the all-ceramic crown.

The tooth had already been reduced far too much.

The large front tooth needed to be made smaller, so we reduced it accordingly,

and there was decay off to the side, so we treated that at the same time.

You can see that the peg lateral required noticeably less reduction.

We make temporary teeth

to check the change in tooth size.

This process is the most important step in front-tooth veneer treatment.

We redistribute the tooth proportions to be closer to average,

and shape the teeth so they give a sufficiently natural-tooth feel.

We give the teeth enough three-dimensional depth

so that, even though they're veneers, they look like natural teeth.

Translucency is built into the incisal edge to express a youthful-looking tooth.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic