Question:
I have 6 porcelain veneers. I had to have one of the front porcelain veneers replaced because of a chip on it. The new porcelain veneer is more opaque than the others. (I couldn’t tell this at the dentist’s office.) What, if anything, can be done to make all 6 porcelain veneers match in opacity??
—Lee Ann in Tennessee
Lee Ann,
After it’s on, nothing can be done to affect the opacity of your porcelain veneer other than re-doing it.
An expert cosmetic dentist should be able to match the color and opacity of the new porcelain veneer to the old. And a true cosmetic dentist will be working with a dental lab that specializes in porcelain veneers and also understands color and opacity. This is the area where non-expert general dentists get tripped up the most—in the area of color, translucency, and opacity. A trained cosmetic dentist will have thorough training in all the many facets of color-matching, opaques, blocking out undesirable colors, translucency, the effect of various light sources on color, etc. Porcelain veneers are quite thin, and they require special expertise to do them right.
Admittedly, matching a single porcelain veneer to the others you have in your mouth can be a little tricky. But there are a couple of ways an expert cosmetic dentist might deal with this.
For one, there should have been a record made of the original set of porcelain veneers, maybe kept by the dental laboratory, giving them some guidance on how much opacity was used with that original set. Then it would be fairly simple to duplicate that.
If that wasn’t done, or if you’ve switched dentists in the meantime, there still should be a try-in before the new veneer is permanently bonded. All this requires is a commitment on the part of the dentist to fiddle with this until it is right. You try it in, and if it’s not right it goes back to the lab until it is right. It’s work, but it’s not complicated.
Yours,
—Dr. David Hall
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More information about porcelain veneers:
- Can I get my porcelain veneers any whiter after they’re put on?
- What about Lumineers. What can you tell me about them?
- What can I do about stains forming on the edges of my porcelain veneers?
- Find out about the costs of porcelain veneers.
- How long can I expect porcelain veneers to last?
- Mark in Michigan had four porcelain veneers done and then later had six more. The porcelain veneers don’t match. Dr. Hall says that the dentist probably didn’t use try-in gel to check the color before they were bonded.