The eyes might be the window to your soul, but it's your smile that people remember. Cosmetic dentistry offers you a variety of ways you can improve on your natural smile. You can opt simply to heighten the whiteness of your teeth or you may even need to replace a lost tooth.
The more simple cosmetic dentistry procedures include teeth whitening or using white filling. The common denominator among these procedures is that they don't alter the fundamental shape of your tooth, but just improve its color.
There are a number of commercial teeth whitening options. Some you can buy at a drugstore, but the more powerful whiteners must be administered by a dentist. The purpose of this process is to take discolored teeth and make them appreciably whiter and brighter.
The white fillings are used where you have a cavity. Since the filling is white, it retains a more natural to your teeth and doesn't announce too loudly to the world that you have a cavity. If you already have fillings that aren't white, a good cosmetic dentist can redo them with white fillings.
If you are interested in changing the shape of a tooth or teeth, cosmetic dentistry has various options for you. Depending on how much you want to invest and how great a change you want, you can opt for veneers, bonding, or crowns.
If you have a chipped or cracked tooth, bonding is a process that can hide those imperfections. Bonding involves bonding a resin to the tooth that either fills out a chip or covers up a crack. Bonding can also be used to make a tooth larger if you have a large gap between two teeth.
Veneers can also be used to fix the same dental issues. A veneer however is a thin ceramic shell that covers your entire tooth. Each veneer is custom made for each specific tooth. In addition to fixing the same issues as bonding can, it also reshape a tooth enough to improve a tooth's alignment or whiten teeth so badly stained that traditional tooth whitening methods won't work.
Crowns are a more radical form of a veneer. These thicker caps get placed over each individual tooth. Since they are larger than the thin veneer, they can fix a larger array of dental challenges. If you suffer from tooth decay or any loss of natural structure to your tooth, a crown can be placed over the damaged tooth. When a number of crowns are connected into a single unit, that piece is called a bridge. Similar to veneers, every crown is custom made for each specific tooth that needs work.
Even if you have no tooth to improve, cosmetic dentistry still has a solution for you. Dental implants can be inserted into your mouth where you've lost an entire tooth. Whereas all the other procedures need some tooth to rest on, a dental implant doesn't. The implant itself is a titanium screw that replaces the missing, natural root. Then a custom crown or bridge is attached to the screw.
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