If you have a cosmetic problem with your teeth, you may be debating between using crowns or dental veneers in order to fix it. It's important to know more about both of these types of restorative dental procedures before deciding on which one you want to use.

Why Use Crowns

A dentist will use a crown if they feel that the tooth needs additional help in restoring its strength. There may be something wrong with your teeth cosmetically, but to merit a crown, there generally must also be a problem with the tooth structurally that will make it weak to use for eating. The crown will wrap around your problematic tooth so that you are not doing any chewing with the tooth itself. All of the pressure is put on the crown, which is supported by the healthy part of the tooth.

The dental crown is going to look completely natural due to it being made out of porcelain.  The color will match the existing color of the surrounding teeth, helping it blend in perfectly.  Nobody should be able to notice that you have a dental crown on a tooth when viewing it at a normal distance. 

Why Use Veneers

Veneers are often used when there is a problem with the overall shape of a tooth, but the structure of it is still very strong. This can be due to chips in the tooth that are very noticeable to others or discoloration that cannot be fixed by whitening. The chewing is still performed with the tooth itself rather than with the porcelain veneer, which is why this procedure works best for teeth that are still healthy. 

The nice thing about using veneers is that the dentist will not need to significantly alter the existing teeth in order to have the veneers attached. While a crown requires shaving down a significant portion of the tooth so that a crown can fit over it, a dental veneer only requires that a small portion of the tooth to be removed so the veneer shell can fit on the tooth. This helps make the surface rough so that dental cement will keep the veneer in place.  

Veneers can easily fix problems that are harder to fix with dental crowns. If you want to close up the gaps between several teeth, you can actually do so by using veneers so that the front surfaces of the teeth meet in the middle of the gap. 

Meet with your dentist for more information about dental crowns and veneers, or visit a website like http://www.barnstabledental.com