Hi, I’m Dr Peter Poulos, your Sydney Cosmetic Dentist here at Bondi Junction in Sydney.

Yesterday, we saw a new patient, Steve from Centennial Park. During our cosmetic consultation, he shared with us that he always wanted to get his teeth fixed. With his work always being in front of Zoom running online conferences and meetings, he was always conscious of his smile. One of his mates shared about shaving their teeth before getting veneers. So he asked me, “Do I also need to get my teeth shaved for veneers?”

This is another one of those common questions from my veneer patients. So I thought I’d make this short video so you can understand a little bit better about veneers.

First, let me correct the dialogue, I hate using the word “shave” because shave refers to a gross reduction of something. With dental veneers, what we talk about and the language we use is preparation or prepare your teeth. Preparation is a skill, it has purpose, its technical and it supported by best practise principles!

Essentially, most people will need their teeth prepared in some capacity. Now, it ultimately depends on the results that firstly you want and secondly that you need. There are cases where people still have a nice alignment of teeth, but they’ve got issues with chips, breaks, surface fractures, colour, small size of teeth, that they want to address, where no prep or very minimal prep of teeth is appropriate.

However, we then need to consider the final result that you want, and this is where the preparations become very important.

If we’re looking at an issue of colour, if you have very dark teeth and you want to lighten those teeth by moving to a very bright colour, then even if your teeth are in a perfect position, we still have to do some preparation and adjustment depending on the final colour that you want.

Because porcelain, as much as it’s a magic material, still needs a prerequisite thickness to be able to mask underlying colour. Now, if you tell me that you don’t want your teeth shaved at all, but you want a really bright white veneer, I can give that to you by not preparing your teeth and overlaying over what you’ve got….

BUT the issue that I can guarantee you will have is these big, bulky white, Tic Tacs going bang out of your mouth. I can almost certainly see that you are not going to be happy with me.

Similarly, when it comes to alignment, if you have a shift to the left or to the right and your midline’s slightly off, then again we will have to prepare your teeth in a certain way to align them correctly and bring everything back to a harmonious and symmetrical state.

Now, all these examples are changes that are usually required in veneer cases!

A lot of people are not going to have veneers done on perfect teeth. So Essentially, the fact that you are needing or thinking about veneers tells us that there is an issue there already. A lot of the times, to rectify the issues that patients want changed, the correct way to do it is by doing some element of tooth preparation.

At the end of the day, if your dentist knows and understands how to deliver the product that you want in a safe and predictable way, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot prepare teeth safely to deliver the results that patients want.

I hope you find this video insightful and that you’ve finally understood what teeth preparation is.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your smile with dental veneers, our proprietary system Perfect 10™ might be right for you.

To organise your smile consultation, simply call us on 02 9369 1236, complete the form on the website, or send us a message on social media, and we’ll be in touch to help you organise a consultation. See you in our next video!

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