See How We Do Cosmetic Dentistry
Cosmetic dentistry is something that we do a lot of. And one of the things that I’ve found, though, is that there is so much information online about cosmetic dentistry. And you’d be surprised, but a dentist can take a weekend course in cosmetic dentistry and on Monday call himself a cosmetic dentist. And that’s the hard part from a patient’s perspective.
I have been a dentist for 32 years, and I was a prosthodontist at the beginning of my career. And what I found as a prosthodontist, and the part that I found the most fulfilling, was really that we could design a smile. And that’s what cosmetic dentistry is, is designing a smile that has the appropriate color and shape and symmetry so that it fits with your mouth and then it looks beautiful.
Some of the services that we use in cosmetic dentistry is Invisalign. We make sure that the teeth are in the right position before we can change the shape and the color or any broken teeth. I have seen with cosmetic dentistry patients that are going in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is sometimes they had work done that looks okay, but it doesn’t function well. So it has to be tied together – not only the function of the work that needs to be done but also the function and the aesthetics of the teeth.
So with cosmetic dentistry, the very first step is really just to see what you want and what can be done. And the way I determine that is with photographs, X-rays, make sure that everything is sound and healthy, and then we make models. And now we use digital models; we don’t have to fill a tray up with gunk and put it in your mouth. So with these digital models and with the photographs, I can then put together a treatment plan, and we can go as fast or as slow as you want to. So there are a lot of options available.
The one thing I do tell people, though, is that there is generally one really good option and many bad options. And what you want to do is start heading in the good option direction.