Cosmetic dentistry is capable of making stunning changes to the look and feel of your smile, and no treatment is more illustrative of that than veneers. These thin shards of porcelain are astonishingly powerful, allowing you to completely alter the apparent color and shape of your teeth in as few as two appointments!
Given everything that this treatment is capable of, you might wonder whether the treatment is sufficient to handle misaligned teeth. If you want to know more, here’s some information you might find illuminating.
Can Veneers Straighten My Smile?
The answer to this question can be a little bit complicated. In some circumstances, it’s certainly possible for a set of veneers to give you a straighter smile. However, given that this treatment doesn’t actually involve moving the teeth, it’s limited in what it can do in this regard.
Typically veneers are sufficient to straighten mildly misaligned teeth, but for more substantial issues, orthodontic intervention may still be necessary.
How Do Veneers Straighten Teeth?
As was previously mentioned, your veneers won’t actually move your teeth. You might therefore wonder how they could possibly correct misalignment.
Looking at it one way, crooked and gapped teeth are a problem with the position of the teeth; a crowded smile is a result of teeth being too close together, and a holey one comes from them being too far apart. However, looking at the situation another way, one could argue that misalignment is an issue with the shape of the teeth. If crooked teeth were small, or shaped differently, they wouldn’t overlap. If gapped teeth were bigger, they would meet.
This is where veneers come in. Your dentist can remove a small portion of your enamel and cover the teeth with veneers, changing their apparent shape so that they’re perfectly in alignment with each other. In this way, the treatment can potentially straighten out your smile.
What Can’t Veneers Do?
However, this approach is a little bit limited. There are some issues that veneers won’t be able to fix just by changing the shape of the teeth. For one, severe overbites and underbites typically can’t be corrected without moving the top and bottom jaw closer together.
Heavily rotated, diseased, or impacted teeth also won’t be able to support veneers adequately, meaning that this treatment can’t properly address these issues on its own.
In these cases, you may need orthodontic treatment or to make use of another kind of oral appliance before getting your veneers.
About Our Practice
At Vason Family Dentistry of Buckhead, we combine the latest developments in oral medicine with good old-fashioned chairside manner, giving our patients the best of both worlds. We believe that everyone deserves a beautiful smile, which is why we endeavor to make the treatments that we offer as easy and convenient as possible. We also work extremely hard to ensure that the restorations we provide are meticulously tailored to you.
If you have any questions about veneers, we can be reached at our website or by phone at (404) 367-9799.