Dental Bonding: The Perfect Way To Restore Your Smile
Your smile is such a key feature on your face that a single flaw can easily be noticed. That’s why celebrities pay thousands of dollars for a picture-perfect smile. Besides the obvious aesthetics, dental issues such as cracks and chips can also affect your oral health.
However, minor issues such as stains, chips, or cracks shouldn’t deter you from enjoying your life. Our dentist offers dental cosmetic bonding for patients who wish to have a more aesthetic smile. Cosmetic bonding can revamp your smile almost instantly.
More and more people today are going for dental bonding since it is an effective way of correcting minor dental issues with minimal tooth preparations.
Understanding Dental Bonding
In dentistry, bonding is a procedure where our dentist uses composite resin, a tooth-colored material, to repair chipped, discolored, or cracked teeth.
Just as the name suggests, the composite resin is “bonded” or cemented to your tooth’s surface. Composite resin has always been the preferred choice since it can be shaped and polished to fit in with the rest of your teeth.
Bonding in dentistry is a relatively quick and inexpensive method of dealing with minor dental flaws or issues such as chips or cracks. The dental bonding procedure is pain-free.
Are You The Right Candidate For Dental Bonding?
You can receive dental bonding if you want to:
- Improve the appearance of stained teeth
- Elongate your teeth
- Repair cracked or chipped teeth.
- Cover the space left when your gums recede
- Reshape your teeth
- Close the gaps between your teeth
With dental bonding, the issue you are trying to solve should be cosmetic. If you have chips, cracks, or fractures that affect your teeth’s structure or strength, you have a dental restoration.
How Is Dental Bonding Done?
As mentioned earlier, the dental bonding procedure is a straightforward and quick one. Here is what you can expect:
- Preparation
Because of the simplistic nature of the procedure, you don’t need to prepare beforehand. Your lunch break is enough time for you to get your smile revamped. The procedure is not invasive, so there is typically no need for our dentist to administer anesthesia. However, anesthesia may be used when you are using the resin as a filling, if your tooth needs reshaping, or if the crack being fixed is close to the nerve.
- Bonding
For your teeth to properly accommodate the resin, our dentist has to treat them with a conditioning liquid. After this, our dentist will use a shade guide to aid in selecting a color that will match the rest of your teeth.
Once the correct shade has been found, our dentist in Covina will apply the composite resin to your teeth. After successfully applying the resin, our dentist will mold and smooth the resin, then expose it to bright light, which aids in hardening the resin. Once the composite resin has been set, our dentist has to perfect the bonding. This means that the composite resin will be trimmed, shaped, and polished to have the same sheen as your natural teeth.
After Care
Composite resin isn’t as sturdy as your teeth, so it might chip, crack, or get stained much faster than other materials. Therefore, you need to be extra careful when you are taking care of them. Here are some tips:
- Brush at least two times each day, generally after eating meals
- Floss at least once a day, before or after brushing your teeth
- Use your normal mouthwash once daily.
- Avoid smoking because tar and nicotine present in cigarettes can stain your teeth.
- Cut down on foods and drinks that easily stain your teeth, such as curry, coffee, and tea.
- Avoid habits such as biting nails or other hard objects such as raw carrots and ice.
- Visit our dentist immediately if you notice that your teeth have sharp edges.
How Long Does Dental Bonding?
Depending on your dental habits and the bonded teeth’ location, you can expect it to last between four and ten years.
Cosmetic dental bonding can restore your smile with minimal effort. Contact our dentist at Jeffrey L. Cohen, DDS, if you would like to restore or upgrade your smile.