Porcelain Veneers

Roughly 0.3 to 0.7 mm on the facial, but the honest answer is that the number depends on what the veneer is correcting. Closing a diastema or adding length can need almost no reduction; masking a dark tooth or moving a rotated one needs room for opacity and contour. Reduce from the planned final shape, not from the existing tooth — a reduction guide made from the wax-up is the single best thing you can bring to the appointment.

Because the enamel bond is what holds a veneer on. A thin ceramic shell has almost no mechanical retention of its own, and adhesion to enamel is far more predictable than adhesion to dentin. Once the margin runs onto dentin, debonds and marginal staining tend to follow. Where a case forces you there, tell us before we start and expect a franker conversation about prognosis.

Calibrated photographs with a shade tab held in the same plane as the teeth, a stump shade for every prepped tooth, and a note on what the patient actually dislikes about the current shade. A tab number gives us hue and chroma but nothing about translucency, halo or surface texture — which is most of what makes an anterior unit read as real.

Yes, and on anterior work you should. Try-in pastes let you seat the veneers, look at them wet and in the patient’s own lighting, and confirm value before anything is cured. Value is the parameter that most often goes wrong and the one you cannot correct after cementation. If it is not right at try-in, send them back to us — that is a far better outcome than grinding on a bonded veneer.

If the case is about esthetics at the highest level and there is enough prep depth and enamel to work with, hand-layered porcelain gives a ceramist more freedom to build translucency and internal effects. If the veneer has to be thin, if the tooth is unprepped, or if the case will take load, lithium disilicate is the sturdier choice and will handle better on its way to the mouth. Send us the photos and the plan and we will tell you which way the case leans.