Cosmetic Dentistry

Cosmetic dentistry has a reputation problem, and some of it is deserved. The field attracts a certain amount of overselling, and there are practices where every patient somehow needs ten veneers. That is not how this works here. The most common cosmetic advice we give is that a professional clean and a course of whitening will get you eighty percent of the result for five percent of the cost, and a lot of people stop there perfectly happy.

Whitening

We offer take-home whitening using custom trays made from impressions of your own teeth. A custom tray matters more than people expect: the generic trays sold over the counter leak gel onto the gums, which is both the main cause of sensitivity and the reason results come out patchy. With a proper tray the gel stays where it is meant to be.

Most people wear the trays for an hour a day over ten to fourteen days. Results vary with the starting shade and with what caused the discolouration. Yellowing from age and from coffee, tea and red wine responds very well. Grey discolouration from old tetracycline exposure responds poorly, and we will tell you that before you spend anything rather than after.

Whitening does not change the colour of existing fillings, crowns or veneers. If you have a white filling in a front tooth and you whiten the teeth around it, that filling will end up looking darker by comparison and may need replacing to match. That is worth knowing in advance, and it is the kind of detail that gets skipped in a sales conversation.

Composite bonding

Bonding uses tooth-coloured composite resin applied directly to the tooth and shaped by hand. It is the right answer for chipped edges, small gaps, worn corners and minor shape irregularities. It usually needs no drilling and no anaesthetic, it is done in a single appointment, and if you do not like it, it can be removed. Very little in dentistry is genuinely reversible. Bonding nearly is.

The trade-off is longevity and stain resistance. Composite is softer than porcelain and it will pick up staining at the margins over several years. For many people that is an entirely acceptable trade for the lower cost and the conservative approach.

Porcelain veneers

A veneer is a thin porcelain shell bonded to the front of a tooth. Veneers do things bonding cannot: they resist staining almost indefinitely, they handle larger changes in shape and alignment, and they reflect light in a way that looks convincingly like enamel because porcelain is structurally similar to it.

They are also irreversible. A small amount of enamel is removed to make room for the shell, and once that is done the tooth will always need a covering of some kind. We are direct about that. If someone is considering veneers on healthy, well-aligned teeth purely for colour, we will usually suggest whitening first and revisiting the question afterwards.

Where veneers genuinely earn their place is on teeth that are already compromised: heavily filled front teeth, significant wear, enamel defects, or a shape problem that no amount of whitening addresses.

How we plan a cosmetic case

We start with photographs and a conversation about what specifically bothers you. That sounds obvious but it matters, because patients and dentists frequently notice different things. For anything involving more than one or two teeth we make a diagnostic wax-up: a physical model of the proposed result you can look at and hold before any treatment starts. You can approve it, change it, or decide against the whole thing at that point, having spent very little.

Underneath all of it, health comes first. We do not place cosmetic work over active decay or untreated gum disease. It fails, and it fails expensively. Anything necessary gets sorted out first.