How To Avoid Getting Bad Porcelain Veneers (Part 3)

Getting porcelain veneers can be fun or traumatic, depending on whether the final outcome is beautiful or badly flawed. Learn the 10 most common mistakes when getting porcelain veneers, and how to avoid them.

This is part 3 of a series explaining the top 10 most common mistakes made by inexperienced dentists doing porcelain veneers, and how you can avoid picking the wrong dentist. We also briefly described in the first part of the series how amazing well-done veneers can look. It is our goal that after reading this series, you will be able to choose the right cosmetic dentist in Colorado Springs for you and avoid any major mistakes.

5. The fourth mistake we see when patients come to our office with veneers done by another dentist is intense staining under the veneers. If the dentist uses a ferric sulfate solution as a hemostatic (anti-bleeding) agent during the procedure, this creates a major problem. This can result in dark black stains under the veneers that can appear in a matter of weeks or months. The proper method for stopping bleeding of the gums during a veneer procedure is to use an aluminum chloride solution. When you are interviewing a potential dentist to do your veneers, it can be a wise idea to simply ask what the dentist uses as a hemostatic agent. If he’s using ferric sulfate, keep looking for the right dentist because you haven’t found him yet!

6. Another red flag to watch out for is the dentist who does not provide before and after photos of previous cases. (Teeth-only photographs can be very telling of the dentist’s artistic abilities without revealing the identity of the patient.) First of all, it is important for dentist’s to document every step of the case with photograph and x-ray footage. This is critical for maintaining a precise record of every procedure he does, and it is important for legal reasons as well as for providing patient “testimonials” in marketing materials. Therefore, if a dentist in Colorado Springs is unable to show you before and after photos of successful cases, this is a sign that either the dentist has no experience or he is terrible at charting and keeping himself out of legal trouble.

7. This next mistake may be an honest and somewhat benign error, but it could be a sign of lack of experience. When making impressions of your mouth for the temporary and permanent veneers, your cosmetic dentist in Colorado Springs should make two impressions. Unless your dentist is utilizing high-tech digital impressions, it is actually quite common for there to be a flaw in the impression. He may send it off to the laboratory for your veneers to be constructed, and then end up with the lab sending requesting a second impression because of a flaw in the first one.

Come back next week for part 4 in this series.