Hi Dr. Hall,
I’m wondering if your recommendations on here are also good to treat children? My daughter is 11, she fell and broke off the majority of her 2 front teeth. Only a little bit of the top and sides were remaining, the whole front/middle was gone. I took her to her general dentist and he said he needed to fill the hole with bonding, and it looks terrible. It’s so lumpy, and my daughter and me are devastated. The teeth with bonding are lumpy, short, and uneven. I don’t want her to go through life like this at 11 years old, so reaching out to you to see if the cosmetic dentist that you recommend in your lists are also good options for children or if you have any other recommendations of anyone that would be able to help us.
Thank you for your time.
– Jessica from Phoenix
I searched for Can bad dental bonding be fixed?
(See Dr. Hall’s answer below.)
We thank our advertisers who help fund this site.
Jessica,
I wouldn’t hesitate to go to an expert cosmetic dentist for your daughter’s front teeth. While many expert cosmetic dentists only treat adults, as long as your daughter is able to sit still in the dental chair and isn’t a management problem, they would consider her an adult.
Doing a beautiful job with dental bonding poses two problems for your general family dentist or pediatric dentist. One is that this work is basically free-hand sculpture and obviously requires a fair amount of artistic ability, which is not a forte for most dentists, as well as a passion for appearance-related dentistry. The second is that it requires an assortment of bonding materials including a mixture of high-strength and high-gloss dental composites and possibly tints—materials that simply aren’t stocked by dentists who don’t do a lot of this work.
In spite of the horrible appearance of your daughter’s dental bonding, your family dentist did one thing right, and that is address the problem with dental bonding rather than crowns on your daughter’s front teeth. At the age of 11, your daughter’s front teeth are going to have large pulps, making crowns on those front teeth risky. Because of the depth of a good crown preparation, there would be a risk of hitting the pulp with a crown preparation, which would complicate her treatment by requiring accompanying root canal treatment. Also, those front teeth will probably erupt a little more, which would expose the margin between the crown and the tooth in a few years. Later on, she will probably need crowns on those teeth, but if you can put that off until at least her college years, that would be the best, in my opinion.
– Dr. Hall
Do you have a comment or anything else to add? We’d love to hear from you. Enter your comment below. Or click here to ask Dr. Hall a question.
About David A. Hall
Dr. David 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 complete Internet marketing for dentists.