Veneer Treatment That Restores Proportion for a Peg Lateral and Protruding Front Teeth

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

A tooth that's smaller than its normal size is called a peg lateral.

It usually appears in the lateral incisors, the teeth on either side of the central front teeth.

Veneers are the most widely used treatment for a peg lateral.

Front-tooth veneer treatment for a peg lateral means using veneers

to build up a small tooth whose proportion needs to be adjusted.

This treatment can offer patients with a peg lateral the following benefits.

1. Adjusting proportion

A peg lateral can look relatively small compared to the surrounding teeth.

Proportion matters a great deal in dental esthetics.

Using veneers adjusts the proportion to create a more natural appearance.

This can make the smile look more beautiful and well balanced.

2. Improving the smile

People with a peg lateral often express esthetic dissatisfaction about it.

Veneers improve the patient's smile by compensating for the peg lateral's size and adjusting its shape.

3. Dream Dental Clinic's own natural appearance

Dream Dental Clinic's veneers are very thin and translucent, giving a natural appearance.

The build-up ceramic material blends well with the patient's own tissue and harmonizes with the surrounding teeth.

This is something a computer-milled veneer simply cannot replicate.

4. Protecting the tooth

Veneer treatment for a peg lateral improves the appearance without reducing or structurally damaging the tooth.

A good number of peg laterals can be treated with no-prep veneers.

This offers the advantage of improving the smile while still protecting the tooth.

5. Fast treatment

Veneer treatment can be completed relatively quickly.

It can usually be finished in two visits, so patients can get the result they want in a relatively short time.

Veneers are one of the most effective ways to improve a peg lateral and make a patient's smile beautiful.

This patient had large, protruding front teeth

along with a very small peg lateral.

The peg lateral had already been treated once before,

but it debonded not long after, so she came to our clinic.

Most peg laterals can be treated with no-prep veneers,

but this was a very unfortunate case, since a significant amount had already been reduced.

No matter how much we reduced the size of the peg lateral,

the front teeth were still too large and looked protruding,

so we decided to address both together.

As mentioned earlier,

proportion matters a great deal in a treatment like this.

We have to carefully adjust the proportion between the teeth to resolve the esthetic problem.

In order to adjust the proportion,

we preview the shape the teeth will take.

Here, the biggest esthetic problem

is the shape of the front teeth.

Because the root side of the front tooth encroaches into the space of the tooth next to it,

this had to be addressed,

which made creating a natural tooth shape quite challenging.

Various effects had to be built into the veneer.

While paying close attention to these details,

we preview the shape of the teeth in wax before the veneer treatment.

Gum contouring, adjusting tooth proportion, and more —

a range of demanding treatments had to be carried out.

We proceed with tooth reduction according to the veneer treatment plan.

The amount of tooth reduction

has to be precisely calculated in full before treatment even begins.

The front-tooth veneer treatment has been completed.

A range of effects were built in to make the front teeth look smaller.

First, we brought out plenty of three-dimensional depth.

The stronger the sense of depth, the smaller a tooth tends to look.

We express translucency and a yellow tone in careful harmony.

A veneer without depth or translucency — flat and opaque —

makes a tooth look even larger.

As one-day veneers have become more common recently,

many of them fail to properly express a natural tooth,

which is unfortunate when you consider esthetics.

At the root side of the front tooth,

through yellow staining in the veneer ceramic,

we made sure the tooth doesn't look too wide.

You can see that each individual tooth

carries plenty of natural expression.

You can see that the protruding front teeth and the peg lateral

have been expressed naturally and beautifully through veneers.

Natural beauty

Since 2006, Dream Dental Clinic