The Basics of Dental Bonding

Dental bonding is a simple, painless procedure that your dentist can do for you right in his office in one visit. In dental bonding the dentist will apply a layer of tooth colored plastic resin to the teeth, which they will then cure with light that in essence “resurfaces” the teeth without using veneers or crowns.

Cost Efficient

This is a cheaper, quicker, yet effective method of giving you that perfect smile than using porcelain crowns. Dental bonding is not only used for covering discolored teeth, but also is used to close unsightly gaps between the teeth, repair chipped, cracked, or otherwise damaged teeth, lengthen “short” looking teeth, as well as re-contour the entire mouth, rather than using more costly and labor intensive crowns.

Dental bonding can also be used to repair cracks or breaks in teeth without having to use more costly and invasive procedures such as pulling the tooth for implants, or grinding the tooth for porcelain crowns or caps, as the resin can be made to match the color of the surrounding/existing teeth.

Dental bonding can be used as a structural repair for broken or rotted teeth as well as a cosmetic repair for crooked or discolored teeth and often at a fraction of the cost of other more invasive repairs such as implants and crowns. Dental bonding will last from around seven years to as long as ten or eleven years with proper care.

Better Alternatives

Often, smaller repairs may be completed in one visit, but larger fillings usually require two visits as your dentist will make a mold of the filling needed, then put a temporary filling in place while the permanent filling is made and color matched in a dental lab.

Advantages of dental bonding fillings as opposed to the old style silver fillings are that the boned material requires less healthy tooth material to be removed and it actually sticks, or bonds, to the tooth whereas the old style silver fillings required more healthy tooth to be removed and does not stick to the tooth.

The bonded material filling is also able to be color matched to your tooth and so is virtually invisible. Dental bonding may also be used to correct crooked teeth without the time and expense of braces. To straighten crooked teeth the dentist will merely go over your existing teeth with the bonding material the shape and contour the material to create the desired effect.