How a cosmetic dentist might use dental crowns and porcelain veneers to perfect and enhance a smile.
About this cosmetic dentistry makeover:
When we look at a person's smile our mind expects to see a certain characteristic tooth symmetry that it finds normal and cosmetically pleasing. The teeth on a person's left side are usually more or less a mirror image of the same teeth on the right side. Additionally the relative length of the teeth together as a unit usually makes up a characteristic pattern. Most commonly a person's center two teeth (central incisors) and the eyeteeth (cuspids, also called canines) are somewhat similar in length. The teeth that lie between them (the lateral incisors) are usually just slightly shorter.
When you look at the biting edges of this person's teeth you can see that there is quite a bit of length discrepancy with all six of the front teeth. As a result there isn't really any left to right smile symmetry. Adding to this cosmetic disharmony, while overall the alignment of this person's teeth is fairly uniform, their right lateral incisor seems set back just slightly.
Beyond a lack of symmetry this person's teeth also have a large amount of color variation. Clearly the brown discoloration on the center right tooth (right central incisor) must be where a large white filling has stained. Due to the poor quality of this photo it's hard to speculate what has caused the other tooth discoloration that is visible. Other brown stains might be other deteriorated fillings, staining incorporated into the tooth's enamel during tooth formation, or even just flaws with the photo itself. It's not really possible to speculate. (For others submitting photos for cosmetic dentistry makeover simulations, while we did enjoy editing this case it seems unlikely we would choose to edit any other photos of similar photographic quality.)
Our suggestions for a cosmetic dentistry solution:
With smile makeover cases like this one dental crowns or porcelain veneers (or more likely some combination of both) are typically an excellent way to achieve a vastly improved cosmetic end result. Porcelain veneers and dental crowns will each provide an identical cosmetic change but from a functional standpoint these dental restorations are quite different. For this reason it would be proper for the dentist performing the actual treatment to determine which of these restorations would be most suitable for which teeth.
The goal with this cosmetic dentistry makeover would simply be to resize and reshape the teeth so as a group they display a more perfect and characteristic uniformity. The same restorations (porcelain veneers or dental crowns) used to make these shape changes will also provide the improved color uniformity that no doubt this person seeks.
Additional notes about our cosmetic dentistry treatment plan.
Per usual please realize that the cosmetic dentistry treatment plan we have suggested here has been formulated by simply visualizing the "before" photograph you see above. Our intentions with this as with all of our cosmetic simulations is to simply suggest how a smile might be idealized, therefore providing a starting point for a patient and dentist dialog.
With this case the changes in tooth length we have illustrated will be constrained by factors related to this person's bite. Of course these are factors that we cannot ascertain from a photo. We would suggest that even if the dentist performing this work determines that all of the length addition we have illustrated is not possible, even with less tooth length change a very pleasing cosmetic end result should still be possible.