Dr. Hall,
My question is, how hard is it to get all veneers to match, when the tooth stubs are dark. I’m getting one crown, and the rest of the smile is porcelain veneers. In my case, the crown looks whiter than the adjacent veneers. Shouldn’t there be a way to make them more matched? Love my dentist, but I think it could be a dental lab issue. I paid a lot of $ & I’ve seen many cases where everything matches. Thanks!!
– Carol from Pittsburgh

Carol,
This is an issue that a lot of family dentists have trouble with. Dental schools tend to trivialize cosmetic dentistry and teach that it is easy to do–any dentist can do this. But there are some basic color concepts that they really don’t teach the dentists. And then the vast majority of dentists don’t have a passion for appearance-related dentistry, so they don’t take the trouble to get this extra training.

Porcelain is naturally translucent, just like enamel, which makes it an excellent dental material. But porcelain veneers are thin, and porcelain crowns are several times thicker than veneers. So if the underlying teeth are dark, as yours are, that dark color is going to shine through the porcelain veneers much more than it would with the crown. That is the basic problem here.

There are two basic ways around this. One way is to accomplish this with the porcelain. Another is for the dentist to apply the opaque to the teeth before sending the case to the lab.

Opaquers can be added to the porcelain, but this requires quite a bit of skill on the part of the laboratory, to make the entire case turn out correctly. If the crown is translucent, the veneers need to be opaqued in a way that makes them appear just as translucent as the crown. It can be done, but is tricky. It also requires good communication between the dentist and the laboratory–the dentist needs to either provide photos of the prepared teeth or a detailed description of their color so that the laboratory can make the proper adjustments. There are excellent esthetic dental laboratories that can do this well.

In my practice, I preferred dealing with the opacity issue myself, as part of the tooth preparation. I would shave a little extra from the dark teeth and then apply an opaque layer of composite onto the teeth. The deeper the opaque layer is, the more room is available to create the needed translucent effect with the porcelain. The composite bonds chemically to the porcelain veneer luting cement giving a strong, attractive result.

– Dr. Hall

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