Comprehensive Cosmetic Dentistry Treatments

Dr. Jason Hecht: What cosmetic dentistry generally is, is someone seeking a lift, some kind of boost to their smile, and there's a number of ways of doing that. It could be as simple as doing a little bonding to a chipped tooth, but doing it in the right way, doing it with an artist's touch. Or it could be as complex as someone with teeth that are as crooked as can be. And in one day being able to get them temporary veneers, which is a surface that goes over to the teeth, to the finished veneers, which is basically a thin sheet of porcelain, anywhere from .2 millimeters thick to 1.2 millimeters thick, which is basically the thickness of a fingernail. And it gets very nicely designed by a lab technician, and it gets basically permanently bonded onto the tooth. What you end up with, you don't have to know that it's this fingernail thick veneer, but what you end up is when you look in the mirror, when people see you, you go ahead and smile and you see that beautiful brand new teeth. And that's what, really, in essence, is cosmetic dentistry. Dr. Alex Hecht: And also, people will come in, and they have a lot of silver fillings in their mouth, and if that's a problem for them, they come in and they just don't want that silver filling. Or those silver fillings are a fine restoration, but they are black and not tooth like looking. Doing the white fillings, or white inlays, or white crowns instead of those dark restorations is also considered cosmetic dentistry. You can consider cosmetic dentistry gum treatments because they could have the most beautiful set of teeth, perfectly aligned, but if they have red, bleeding gums with gook sitting around them, that's not very pleasant to look at. So if you do periodontal treatments on those patients and get their tissue to heal and turn nice and pink instead of this bloody red, that's also considered cosmetic dentistry. Dr. Jason Hecht: And back to the silver fillings. What a lot of people don't realize is one thing you think of with silver fillings, when you open, and you see the top of the silver filling, you see that blackness in the mouth. But in addition to that, the silver filling actually leaches through the tooth and stains the tooth from the inside out. So even though the silver filling might be in the middle of the tooth, if you go ahead and look at the tooth from the side, you'll see that blackness coming through the tooth as well, and that's also something that people want to have fixed.