Veneers: How Do They Work?

Curious about how veneers can help improve your smile? Below we take a brief, easy to understand look behind the scenes to see how veneers can make your smile look better and also how the process of getting veneers works.

How Dental Veneers Work

Veneers are essentially an outer covering that gets placed over your existing teeth. You can think of them kind of like a case you’d put over your cell phone. If you don’t like the look of the back of your cell phone or it gets damaged somehow, you can buy a cover to go over it. You just fit it over your cell phone and protects your phone, gives it more support and can make it look better too. That’s pretty much the same role that veneers provide for your teeth.

Veneers are very thin, custom-made covering that get attached to the front of your teeth. They can be used to improve the appearance of teeth that are broken, worn down, gapped, chipped, discolored, misaligned, irregularly shaped and/or overcrowded. The main goal of the veneers is to give you a more perfect looking set of teeth and smile.

How Getting Veneers Works

If you’re interested in getting veneers, here’s how the process generally works…

You start with a trip to the dentist where the dentist will give you a thorough exam and plan out how veneers will improve your smile. After talking with you about the issues you want to address and examining your mouth (maybe even taking some x-rays), the dentist will see if veneers are a good option for your situation.

If you are, then you’ll likely come back for another visit to get your mouth ready to get veneers. During this visit the dentist will remove a thin layer of enamel from any teeth that you’ll be getting veneers for. And when we say a thin layer, we mean thin! Usually they just remove a layer of enamel that’s around 1/2 millimeter thick. After they remove that layer, your dentist will make an impression of the tooth/teeth that will be getting a veneer. The impression will be used by a dental lab in order to create a veneer that’s custom made for your mouth.

Your dentist will also assess the color of your teeth that will not be getting veneers. They do this so that they can color match the veneers to your existing teeth so they will all look very similar.

Once the lab gets the impression of your teeth, it will take them a few weeks, on average, to make your veneers. After they’ve made your veneers, it’s time for another trip to the dentist to get your veneers put in.

First your dentist will put the veneers in your mouth to check their fit and their color. The dentist is able to make some adjustments at this point to make sure that your veneers look and feel just right. At this point, it’s time to bond the veneers with your teeth. To do this, your dentists preps each tooth that’s getting a veneer and applies a dental bonding cement to the tooth. The veneers will stick to this cement. Once the veneer is in place, the dentist will use a specialized light beam which activates certain chemicals in the cement which results in them hardening quickly. This cements your veneers firmly to your teeth.