Bonding VeneersBack

If you want a change in the way your teeth look, then consider bonding and veneers. They assist in making your teeth look better by changing their colour, shape or spacing. Bonding is a painless way to repair a chip in your tooth. Bonding uses white plastic paste, called composite resin which is a plastic that is semi-liquid to start and then becomes hardened and durable when cured with a special light.

The material can be tinted to match the colour of natural teeth and can also be contoured and shaped to resemble the missing part of a tooth. It can be painted over a stained tooth and it can make a fractured tooth look perfect again. Composite resin will also build up the size of teeth so gaps between them are hardly visible.

The steps this entails would be placing a mild chemical on the tooth to make it a little rough, this would help the composite resin stick to the enamel of the tooth. Then, the composite resin is mixed and tinted to match the natural colour of your teeth. Your dentist places the composite resin on the tooth in layers. A very bright light will be used to harden every layer of the resin placed it on your tooth. After the last layer of the composite resin is placed and hardened, the dentist will shape and polish the resin so the finished tooth looks natural and matches the rest of your teeth.


Advantages

• There's not a lot of pain to deal with. There is very little drilling done so there is no need to be placed under a local anesthetic.
• It's not time consuming. More than one tooth can be done at the same time.
• It doesn't cost as much as crowns.
• It can be used on children, because bonded material can be removed and replaced as children's teeth grow.

Disadvantages

• Bonding treatment doesn't last as long as crowns. It can last from five to ten years, compared to 10 to 20 years for crowns.
• Staining can occur a lot faster.

If the seal between your tooth and the bonding material isn't perfect, decay can occur under the composite resin. 

Veneers
Veneers are the thin acrylic or porcelain shells that are attached to the front of the tooth. Like bonding, veneers can cover badly-stained teeth, chipped teeth and uneven teeth plus large fillings.

Veneers are done by the dentist using a local anesthetic to freeze the area so they can remove part of the enamel from the tooth to make room for the veneers. The dentist then creates a mold of your teeth. That mold is then sent to a dental lab where the veneers are custom made. On the following visit, the dentist will place a mild chemical on the tooth to make them a little rough. This would assist the veneers in sticking to your teeth better. After all said is done, the veneers are then attached to your teeth one by one, using composite resin cement.