A Clinic Known for Veneers — Treating a Peg Lateral and Oversized Teeth Naturally with Veneers

Hello. I'm Park Jonguk, director of Dream Dental Clinic, a clinic known for veneers.

When a tooth is much smaller than normal, it's called a peg lateral.

It's a kind of malformed tooth.

It appears most often in the lateral incisor, the tooth right next to the upper front teeth.

Because a peg lateral doesn't look esthetically pleasing,

it's often treated with veneers or resin bonding.

With resin, the color changes over time,

and it can never fully match the color of the natural teeth beside it,

so while it's sometimes used temporarily for younger patients,

it's hard to rely on for the long term.

Ceramic, on the other hand, doesn't change color,

so it can be used for the long term,

and it can be matched almost exactly to the tooth's color,

which is why it's used so often.

Depending on the situation, as in this case,

there can be a peg lateral alongside a front tooth that's relatively too large.

Proportion matters a great deal in dental esthetics.

When the proportions are mismatched like this,

correcting it isn't an easy task.

We have to bring the tooth proportions into balance using various methods,

while still keeping tooth reduction to a minimum.

Here, the tooth shapes are all different from one another.

The sizes vary too, and the angles aren't great either.

The dental alignment was relatively good,

so we decided to treat it in a way that minimized tooth reduction accordingly.

The problem is the area circled in yellow above.

Because of the shape of the tooth,

designing that area was quite challenging.

For a tooth to look smaller,

the root needs to look narrow,

but the problem in this case is that the root is too thick.

We occasionally run into cases like this, where the tooth root is thick,

and it makes designing the case very difficult at the diagnostic stage,

and even once we actually start building the tooth in ceramic,

a lot of thought has to go into how to make the tooth look smaller.

We use wax to build a preview of the teeth beforehand.

We reduce the teeth according to the treatment plan.

For the peg lateral, we only removed the surface staining.

Since the other teeth were quite large to begin with,

they needed to be made smaller, so we reduced them accordingly for the veneers.

In this way, the treatment was completed

naturally and with good proportions.

The gums also ended up harmonizing very well with the veneers.

For the root area mentioned earlier,

using yellow staining,

we designed it so the root area looks narrower.

This is something a one-day, computer-milled method could never replicate.

In this way, the treatment was finished both naturally and beautifully.

Clinics that make truly natural-looking veneers

are becoming fewer and fewer, which is a real shame.

Awkward-looking veneers made by computer in a day or two

are so simple and inexpensive to produce

that more and more clinics are turning them out,

but at Dream Dental Clinic, a clinic known for veneers,

we will continue to pursue veneers this natural, going forward.

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic — a clinic known for veneers