By EKalman March 13, 2023 - 12:35am

Cosmetic dentistry is a special sphere of dental services. It can solve oral health problems too, but without complex intervention: the techniques provide a gentle effect, and the materials used provide an aesthetic smile without the use of heavy systems, wearing prostheses, and complicated surgeries.

Cosmetic dental treatment can improve the patient's looks and bite if the defect is in only one or several teeth. However, it’s focused more on beauty rather than on treatment; for health, it’s better to seek help from a regular dentist.

What Are the Problems Solved by Cosmetic Dentistry?
Cosmetic dentistry’s main goal is to achieve an aesthetically perfect smile. It does not use prosthetics, implantation, or long-term restoration of teeth. It restores the beauty and strength of teeth with the help of special technologies. The problems it typically deals with are:
- The shape of the teeth;
- Proportionality of the teeth row;
- Symmetry;
- A misplaced tooth or entire tooth groups;
- Shade of dental enamel.

Dentists solve all problems with the help of delicate modern materials. In addition, the aesthetic look also has an effect on malocclusion (initially, it is not incorporated, but the correct method of tooth reconstruction allows for solving health problems as well).

What Are the Most Common Cosmetic Defects?
In fact, everything that affects the aesthetics of a smile is a use case for cosmetic dentistry. The most common cases are:
- incorrect position of the teeth;
- a gap between the teeth (it may appear as baby teeth are replaced by adult ones, or it may develop with age);
malocclusion;
- gaps between teeth;
- darkening of tooth enamel;
- curvature of teeth, change in their shape.

For these purposes, you can use prostheses, braces, and corrective devices.. But in the modern world, they are not always relevant. Cosmetic approaches also give an effect, sometimes even a more pronounced one.

How Does a Doctor Work?
Here, first of all, special materials and techniques are important:
- light-curing materials - they allow to eliminate anomalies in the location of individual dental units without the use of plates that damage the enamel;
- the latest fillings with different compositions - help to close the diastema (the gap between the teeth), for which only crowns were previously used that required severe grinding of the tooth;
- light-polymer fillings - allow you to reconstruct a chipped piece of tooth with a guarantee of up to 50 years;
- cosmetic contouring - allows you to make the corners of the teeth more rounded, which restores their youthful appearance, and at the same time softens the front line, providing the patient with pronounced rejuvenation for a more budget price.

All modern materials have incredible strength. The main thing in them is the adhesion force: for old fillings, it was only 5-6 Megapascals (because of this, they quickly fell out and deteriorated), and for new ones, it reached 20 Megapascals. This allows the patient to safely eat solid food after such a filling of the teeth without fear of repeated chipping of the tooth.

Cosmetic Dentistry and Teeth Color
Doctors pay maximum attention not only to the shade of dental enamel but also to the color of the fillings that are used: it must ideally match the natural color of the patient’s teeth, and the so-called opacity criterion is of particular importance - taking into account the degree of turbidity or the degree of transparency of the tooth. Then, by restoring it, the dentist can:
- use mixed materials and techniques;
- apply the material in layers - this creates the natural effect;
- use special devices that allow you to choose the perfect tone (high-precision equipment that calculates the shade to the details).

Such restoration of the tooth is possible using a specialized tool, as well as the latest composite materials. Modern cosmetic dentistry uses inventions of the fourth or fifth generation, which are now available to everyone.