When it comes to maintaining your oral health, dentist visits once every six months are recommended by the Australian Dental Association. This will help keep your mouth and teeth disease free, and in overall good health. But what if you don't like the color or position of your teeth and want to improve your smile? For that, you would visit a cosmetic dentist. A cosmetic dentist's primary job is to enhance the aesthetics of your smile. This could include procedures that alter tooth alignment, color, position, and size.

Cosmetic Dentistry Treatments

Inlays and Onlays: Crafted in a dental laboratory from porcelain or composite material before being bonded to your tooth, inlays provide a filling to a tooth that is too decayed or damaged to support a direct restoration such as amalgam or composite.

Composite Bonding: One of the simplest and least expensive cosmetic dental procedures. Composite bonding is when the dental material known as a composite resin is shaped and moulded on your teeth to give you a straight white smile. It's mainly used to treat minor chipped teeth, gaps, and staining in fillings and teeth.

Teeth Whitening: The most popular cosmetic dentistry procedure year after year, teeth whitening can vastly improve the look of your smile.

Dental Veneers: Dental veneers are custom-made from porcelain or resin composite and are meant to change the colour, shape, size, or length of your teeth's appearance once bonded in place. You can either receive veneers crafted from porcelain or composite resin. Porcelain veneers are created in a dental laboratory from a mould of your teeth

Dental Crowns: Also referred to as caps, a dental crown is a tooth-shaped "cap" that is placed over your tooth to restore its natural appearance. They are used for the protection of a weak tooth that has suffered extensive decay or to hold a fractured tooth together. A dental crown can also restore a tooth that has been broken and support a tooth that has a large filling but not enough natural tooth left to hold the filling firmly. Crowns are made of several different materials each with its benefits and price range. The materials available for crowns are stainless steel, metals like gold alloy and nickel, porcelain fused to metal, all resin, all ceramic, or all porcelain. Dental crowns tend to be expensive so dentists usually only recommend them when other procedures are unlikely to produce satisfactory results. With proper care, dental crowns last for many years.

Bridges: Dental bridges commonly referred to as partials are used to bridge the gap created by missing teeth. Bridges are made of alloy, porcelain, gold, or a combination. They feature two or more crowns that will replace the missing teeth. A dental bridge is supported by your natural teeth so any damage or decay of surrounding teeth can cause your bridge to fail and will need to be addressed. Bridges are permanent and can only be removed by your dentist.