Your web site provides a great deal of information for those of us considering porcelain veneers. With this being a major investment, I want to research it as much as possible. Your site provides information on MAC Veneers and Lumineers. Is there anything you can tell me about JK Veneers, which I’ve read about on some other sites. Thank you, Dr. Hall!!
– Dawn in Iowa
Dawn,
I’m going to suggest that you take a different tack in your research.
It’s not the porcelain that makes the beautiful smile. This is art, not engineering, that you are talking about. There are beautiful and ugly Lumineers smiles, beautiful and ugly MAC veneers smiles, beautiful and ugly Da Vinci veneers smiles, beautiful and ugly Cerec veneers smiles, and beautiful and ugly JK veneers smiles. It’s the dentist and the lab technician that the dentist picks that make the beautiful smile, not the porcelain.
When I choose whether or not to list a cosmetic dentist on my site, I do it on photographs of the final results of their work. And I’ll tell you that I can’t tell, from the photographs, what brand of veneers they are using, and I never ask, and I never will.
If you were asked to commission a painting for the entrance of the building where you work, would you pick the brand of paint or the brush? No, you would pick the artist and let the artist use the materials he or she wanted. But with dental porcelain, you have marketing entering the picture, and these dental porcelain companies trying to sell their porcelains by going direct to the consumer. And dentists are then attracted to the marketing schemes because they can sign up with the porcelain companies to get a piece of the action. For example, a dentist can sign up for the Lumineers course, and then get on the Lumineers list. So they play along with this notion that certain brands of porcelain make the most beautiful or longest-lasting smiles. Don’t get taken in by this.
What you need to do is pick the artist and then let him or her use the dental lab and the porcelain that work best for him or her.
And I think you’d be making a mistake to go to a dentist and specify the brand of porcelain you want him or her to use. If you start questioning them on their materials and telling them how they should do your case, you are going to become an annoying patient and you will not motivate them to do their best work.
I see you’re in Iowa. Check our list of Iowa cosmetic dentists. There are very few good cosmetic dentists in Iowa, so the choice is pretty easy when you know where to go.
Find a dentist/artist that you feel comfortable with, and then let them use the laboratory and the materials that they are the most comfortable with. I’m sure they each will have a ceramist that they have developed a close, trusting relationship with and that they will want to use to produce the most beautiful smile they can. And they each have a porcelain, I’m sure, that they’re partial to.
And as far as durability and other physical issues, I don’t think there’s a significant difference between the brands and how they function in the mouth, when it comes to porcelain veneers.
-Dr. Hall
About David A. Hall
Dr. David A. Hall was one of the first 40 accredited cosmetic dentists in the world. He practiced cosmetic dentistry in Iowa, and in 1990 earned his accreditation with the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. He is now president of Infinity Dental Web, a company in Mesa, Arizona that does advanced internet marketing for dentists.
Leave a Reply