Hi, everyone in today's video.
Let's talk about the three most important things you need to think about before
getting porcelain veneers. So my name's Gurs.
I'm a cosmetic dentist based near London in the UK.
We do a lot of porcelain veneer treatments and we help a lot of people with
complex rebuilding of their smiles. Now,
porcelain veneers are typically a treatment used to quickly
enhance a smile and make a smile look really good.
All those celebrities have this kind of treatment done and it's kind of thought
of as a Hollywood smile. Okay. But it doesn't always need to be this way.
Each smile is a hundred percent customized for each individual.
And this brings me to my first point,
which is how are you going to know that the end result you get is
something that you're happy with? Because if you think about it,
the only reason you would go specifically for porcelain veneers is a cosmetic
enhancement. And cosmetics is subjective.
Some people like wide teeth, some people like narrow teeth.
Some people have longer teeth, some have shorter, some have more curvy,
some have straighter square teeth.
There's so many variations to this and the
way we tackle, this problem in our clinic,
and I know we're a little bit special in the way that we do this is that we
build a trial smile. Okay.
And what this means is we build a smile out of temporary materials first,
and thats has what I think is a good smile for that
patient. But at the end of the day, isn't,
it doesn't matter what I think the patient gets to go home with this trial
smile. They get to use it in function. You know,
so they're not in a dental environment.
They're in a relaxed environment at home.
The numbness can all wear off because when your lips are numb,
you frame your smile differently. And having a trial smile,
having the smile built in this temporary material,
lets you visualize what the end result is going to look like,
but more important to that it actually helps you to see if the veneers are going
to be long lasting because if there's breakages in the temporaries,
it means that the bite may not be correct in the temporaries,
which then means it needs to be modified and worked on before you have your
final restorations.
Because if there's a breakage it's typically because of the
bite and the trial smile is a perfect way to basically test drive this smile.
Now most of my patients, when we do a trial smile, they'll go home,
they'll come back for a review and we'll ask them what they like,
what they don't like. And about 20% of the time,
there's a couple of modifications to make to this. Okay.
So this is really important.
I would much rather my patient come back for 20 review appointments and have
modifications and get to a point where they're really happy with the trial smile
before we commit to the final set of veneers. I mean,
can you think of anything worse than spending all of this money,
going to a dentist to have veneers done?
And they have one appointment to do what we call the prep,
where we do all of our adjustments and then take all the molds and then the next
appointment, they fit the veneers. And it's something that you don't like,
or they ask you to make a snap judgment there. And then, you know,
do you like the veneers by testing them in? And they're not even glued in.
So our process kind of like bypasses that.
I know some dentists have something similar to this,
but make sure that wherever you having,
you're having your veneers done that you have an opportunity to do the whole,
the trial smile and test out what the aesthetics are going to look like.
The second thing, which I think is really,
really important is "are veneers going to affect your dental health in
the long term?" Okay?
Not so much in the short term because you can have them fitted.
And if you do it properly,
there shouldn't be any sensitivity or any real problems.
But it's very well known that the more you take off a tooth,
the more dentists has to drill off your teeth, the weaker that tooth is,
as soon as you start having root canal treatments, the tooth gets even weaker.
So therefore you want to have as little adjustment done to your teeth as
possible. Yeah. A little while ago,
I did the video on dentists in Turkey, right? And ultimately this is my,
my biggest issue. And it's not specific to Turkey.
I shouldn't have mentioned Turkey specifically, but if you,
if you go somewhere abroad for veneers, right, they're going to just do veneers.
Here's a photo of someone on Instagram who got in touch.
And after watching that video and he said, look,
I'm thinking about getting porcelain veneers of had a consultation with these
guys in a country abroad. And they said that I need,
I don't know,
10 veneers and root canal treatment on the front four teeth to
reduce sensitivity. Okay.
So what we can see from these photos is that the teeth are tipped forward.
And this,
in my opinion is 100 percent the wrong treatment for this guy
because his biggest concern is that the teeth are tipped forward. When you're,
when you're searching for veneers, it's tempting to see that, Oh, you know,
you can have an amazing smile in less than a week and it's going to solve all of
your cosmetic problems. You won't feel insecure about the way you look anymore.
You love what you see in the mirror. Okay?
But it's the wrong option for him because what they said was you're going to
need root canal treatment on the front 4 teeth to reduce
sensitivity. This is,
this is just wrong because the reason he needs root canal treatment is going to,
they're going to have to take off so much tooth from the front of the teeth that
they're going to hit the nerve. As soon as they hit the nerve,
they're going to need to do root canal treatment.
Otherwise he's going to get abscesses and longterm problems.
We know that doing a root canal treatment is going to weaken teeth.
And it's true that in the seventies and eighties,
UK dentists used to do this for cosmetic reasons.
It's called elective root canal treatments,
but that was 40 years ago. You know, things have moved on.
We know that that's not the right thing to do is not the most ethical thing
to do. In fact,
the correct treatment plan for this guy was to have braces to gently bring these
teeth back in.
He can have the bottom edge and the top edge tidied it up because at the end of
the day, his front teeth, which are, have gaps and they're all tilted forward,
that's the biggest problem here. And we have to find a solution.
That's going to fix that problem, give him that great smile.
And if he just had his own teeth in a correct position,
and with a little bit of edge bonding, it's minimal treatment,
he's going to get a maximum results.
We haven't caused any longterm damage to the teeth.
And I honestly feel that this is 100% a
way better way to go. Now let's say that you,
you do the prices and you do all this edge bonding and you still want to enhance
your smile a little bit more. Having veneers at that stage,
when the teeth are in a better position is a much better time to do it because
you hardly need to take off any additional tooth to have porcelain veneers
there. Okay.
So be aware of these quick fix places. All right.
Quite often they won't give you the options for braces and things like that.
Just because the, these braces just takes time.
It involves multiple visits. And if you're going somewhere abroad,
especially for this kind of stuff,
they're not even going to give you the option because they know that you're not
going to keep going there every two months for a 30 minute appointment to just
review your braces. So have multiple opinions,
you know, and, make sure that the treatment plan is correct.
And following on from this number three, is,
are you having the right number of Veeneers? Okay. It's again,
it's really tempting, especially the really cheap places.
What they will do is the reason that they do everything really cheap is that
they will say, "Oh, you need 10 veneers." Okay.
So ultimately you end up paying probably a little bit less than if you go with
your top cosmetic surgeon in your, in your area, but the,
is it the right thing to do? Whenever someone comes to our clinic,
we always look at the minimum number of teeth that we can treat to
achieve the patient's goal. Okay. And remember,
the goal is to have a confidence, beautiful looking smile.
It's not to have 10 veneers.
You're 10 veneers is just a route to get to that amazing smile.
And because we do that whole trial smile first,
we can actually test out what the smile will look like. If we did four veneers,
if we did six veneers, if we did eight veneers.
And because a lot of the side veneers are there to widen the smile,
you can actually just test with the temporary materials.
What would it look like if you had six,
eight or 10 veneers and it doesn't need to an even number - It just typically
is. So again,
this is just a way of figuring out what the minimum amount of treatment
is to give you that amazing smile, that every time you look in the mirror,
you love what you see.
And you're not conscious about the way that your teeth look at anymore. Okay?
Because this is an achievable goal. It doesn't need to cost 10, 15,
20,000 pounds. You know,
these days there's a lot of minimally invasive treatments like a composite
bonding. Um, I don't like composite veneers. It's, it's an option,
but they're not really that great looking after, after a couple of months, um,
braces is really, really popular among adults, right?
And rightly so, because all braces does is move the teeth.
And especially among young people, who've hardly had any treatment done.
If you just get your teeth in the right position and you whiten them,
and then you do a little bit of edge contouring,
you can actually transform a smile really,
really dramatically and with very little longterm problems.
So I'm not trying to actually put anybody off, having veneers.
We do a lot of veneer treatment for, for patients.
There is an ethical way of doing it and thinking about the longterm health
of, of the patients. Okay.
Whenever I do small design or anything for my patients, I do always think,
you know what, I'm going to see this, this guy or this girl for the next 10,
15 years. I don't ever want there to be a problem.
And a kind of unwritten rule that I have with all my patients is if there is a
problem and they have been coming back to us regularly for checkups,
we don't charge anything to put that kind of stuff.
So again, you know,
just find out about aftercare with your dentist or wherever you're thinking of
getting this, this done from what are their policies. Because again,
it's not nice to have this super expensive treatment done and something happens
and it's not covered or,
or they're just not really great with the, with the followup. Okay.
So hope you got something out of it. If you did, please give it a thumbs up,
give it a like, um, and I will see next week, take care.