Do veneers ruin your teeth?
No. They do permanently change them, and those are two different things. Preparing a front tooth for porcelain removes roughly half a millimeter of enamel from the front surface, and enamel does not grow back.
So the honest word is commitment. Once a tooth has been prepared it will need something on it for the rest of your life. That is a fine trade when the teeth genuinely needed the help. It is a bad trade when they did not.
About 0.5mm
From the front surface and the biting edge. The back of the tooth is essentially untouched.
No
Treated as a permanent decision from the first conversation.
It can usually be remade
A chipped or debonded veneer can usually be remade. If decay got under the edge, the tooth is treated first, and occasionally the replacement is a crown rather than a veneer.
Often 10 to 20 years
Longer with a night guard if you grind.
Where the horror stories come from
Many of the worst photographs trace back to teeth prepared more aggressively than a veneer requires. Teeth ground down to small pegs are real. They are also the result of over-preparation, usually on someone who arrived wanting whiter teeth and left with ten permanently altered ones.
That is a planning problem, not a porcelain problem.
When veneers are the wrong answer
Plenty of people who ask about veneers should be talked out of them, at least for now:
- The only complaint is color. Whitening costs a fraction of porcelain and removes nothing from the tooth.
- One chipped edge. Bonding handles that in a single visit, often with no drilling.
- Healthy teeth that simply sit crooked. Those should be moved with aligners, and moving them often means far less porcelain afterwards, sometimes none.
- Active gum disease or untreated decay. Cosmetic work goes on top of a healthy mouth, never instead of treating one.
What makes it a reasonable trade
Veneers earn the enamel when several things are wrong at once and they all have to be solved together. Worn short front teeth, deep staining that whitening cannot lift, gaps, and edges that no longer match. Fixing those one at a time with smaller treatments usually costs more in the end and looks worse.
The test is simple. If a smaller treatment gets you most of the way there, do the smaller treatment.
Written by Dr. Peter Bonifatto, DMD, a general dentist in Las Vegas whose practice focuses on cosmetic and restorative work. General information, not a diagnosis. What your own teeth need is decided at an exam, with x-rays.
Ask about your own teeth.
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