Bonding to Repair Fractured Teeth

If you are ever so "lucky" as to have a traumatic accident to your front teeth, you'll know it feels terrible.  Not only does the tooth hurt, but it hurts to look at the missing parts too!  Fortunately, there can be a relatively quick fix to this problem with conservative composite bonding.  Using this technique minimal, and often none, tooth structure needs to be removed.  The tooth colored composite can often be identically matched and added to replace what was missing.  

In this case one of the rewarding challenges for me is to recreate the subtle characteristics of missing parts of the teeth.  If you look really close you'll notice that the teeth on the right hand side of the picture appear to have a particularly white "framing" around the edges.  We do our best to recreate these very small details with special tints layered into the composite (kind of like painting).  Speaking of layers, there are different types of composites with different characteristics.  Typically the strongest composites are the least shiny and tooth-like.  But the more shiny composites are more prone to chipping and breaking.  To get the best of both worlds, the strong composite is layered where the most chewing force is applied, and the prettier composite is layers where you see it most.  Another important aspect is to capture the line angles of the teeth.  You can tell if they're correct when the flash of the camera bounces off of them you'll see the shiny reflection making a vertical line.  These are some of the factors that go into fixing you back up and taking some of the hurt out of your broken teeth!