What are Dental Veneers? – Dr. Matiasevich – Santa Cruz Dentist

What are Dental Veneers?

A question that I get asked probably weekly, a patient will come in and say, “Hey, I’m interested in Luminers,” because they’ve seen an advertisement. But Lumineers really is a porcelain veneer. What a porcelain veneer is is like a – the easiest way to think about it is like a false fingernail that a lady would have put on made out of acrylic. Porcelain is basically a thin piece of porcelain that’s laminated over the teeth that can change the position of the teeth, the color of the tooth, the shape of it, it can make the tooth longer, wider, more narrow. So, it’s a very high end cosmetic procedure.

The big advantage of porcelain veneers over a lot of other options that are out there like bonding and things is porcelain will not stain over time, so it stays the same color. So, whatever that color – if they’re going for a big color change, and they’re a big coffee drinker or smoker or wine drinker, they can rest assured that that glass – because that’s essentially what porcelain is, is a stained glass – is going to stay that color.

But going back to Lumineers, Lumineers is just a trademark, like Coke is for Coke and Pepsi is for Pepsi. It’s the same thing. It’s just the company calls themselves “Lumineers.” But porcelain veneers is basically can be designed a lot of different ways. Sometimes if a person has really dark teeth, then in order to make them whiter, you have to remove a lot more tooth structure in order so that the dark color doesn’t show through the porcelain, whereas other people, if their teeth are fairly straight, a lot of times we don’t have to remove any tooth structure. And that’s what a lot of people have fear about, is they’re like, “Well, are you going to cut my tooth to put the veneer on?” No, there’s a lot of ways we can do it without that, with ultra thin veneers and things like that.