Background

The patient was 20 years old. She had braces as a teenager and was happy with the result that she had. She knew they weren’t perfect, but given that her teeth were really terrible before, she was told that this was the best result achievable, and so accepted the result that she had.

Now that she was a bit older, she wondered if anything could be done to further improve the appearance of how her teeth are. We discussed what she didn’t like and realised it was the gaps and the shape of her teeth.

The first step

First we undertook teeth straightening, via Invisalign, to close the gaps between the teeth. This took 14 weeks altogether. The patient did feel a massive improvement, but felt something was lacking, and we put this down to the shape of her teeth.

What we did next

We then discussed composite veneers. We decided composite (which is white filling material) would be a better option for her rather than porcelain, as she is a young patient and neither of us were keen to put a drill on healthy teeth to make room for porcelain veneers.

We planned her composite veneers using Smilefast and did a digital mock up of what her teeth would look like with composite veneers. This gave the patient and I time to plan together how we wanted the veneers to look, and it gave me, the dentist, time to see if her bite allowed the space for this.

Once the patient approved the digital mock up, we did a try-smile, using a stent to see if she liked the smile on her face. This was very successful.

The final steps

After this, we made another stent to do the actual composite veneers. It was approximately 3 hours in the chair whilst the composite veneers were bonded to her front 6 teeth.

The patient was overwhelmed with the result! Her words were: “This is how I wanted them to look.”