At Dentistry With Integrity, we offer cosmetic crowns to restore both the function and appearance of your teeth.
Cosmetic crowns are custom-made covers placed over damaged or discoloured teeth, helping to improve your smile while providing added strength and support.
Cosmetic Crowns Available At Our Practice In Chester
Using high-quality materials designed to blend naturally with surrounding teeth, our crowns are crafted to achieve an aesthetically pleasing and long-lasting result. Each treatment is planned to suit your unique dental needs, ensuring comfort and functionality. Our team is dedicated to providing a seamless experience, from initial consultation to final placement, in a calm and supportive environment.
Full transcription of this video
Cosmetic crown systems have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. They used to be very destructive, made by technicians in a laboratory by hand. Very complicated. In the hands of a good technician, they could be made to look fantastic.
One of the main advantages we have nowadays is the use of thermoplasticizable and robot-milled ceramics. The thermoplasticized system is technically fantastic. It took them twenty-odd years to perfect it, and basically now they can do a form of injection molding of a thermoplasticized ceramic, which is very, very strong and very, very thin.
The usual one I use is called EMAX. They work very, very well indeed. They look very natural. You can actually have a translucent, passable system where you can see the body of the tooth inside. As long as that’s normal, it looks much, much healthier and much more natural than using some of the old standard, what we would call a frit porcelain.
The other system working very well for us now, because of its strength, is a cone of ceramic. You may have seen these white ceramic knives in cookery shops. They can make knives out of them because it’s a very, very hard material. But what you can also do is take a block of it and have a very complicated little robot with a CAD/CAM system.
The technician basically designs the crown in virtual reality, and then the little milling station (the robot) will actually make a perfectly fitting, perfectly contoured crown in about five minutes. If we want to make it look a bit prettier at the front of the mouth, some of the front of the ceramic is cut away and natural-looking porcelain is applied back onto that by the technician. They look very, very realistic.
It’s so easy now, compared to how it used to be, to produce a very well-fitting, very good-looking crown. Generally, with anything cosmetic, you can expect about ten years, and the reason they fail is usually cosmetic.
We’re putting these crowns in positions where they can be seen – the shop window – as we call it. Everyone likes a good tooth, so they use the smile, and sometimes people have a lip line that shows the gum line of the tooth. Over our lives, those gum lines will recede. We always will get long in the tooth.
So although usually the crowns are perfectly functional. There’s nothing wrong with them compared to the day they were fitted. They don’t look very nice because the gum has gone back and you can see the root.
The good news is that if we do get cosmetic failures, it takes very little further tooth preparation to take that crown off or veneer, re-prepare the margin to take it higher up, and then have a new, better-fitting crown made and cemented. There you go.
The only downside is financial. We don’t have to cut into it as much as we used to.