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Windsor Centre For Advanced Dentistry

What is dental aesthetics?

Your smile is your most important asset. Smiling helps you to communicate and bond with others, reduces your blood pressure and decreases your risk of heart disease. It can also boost your confidence in an instant, and you deserve to love your smile.

Unfortunately, 40 per cent of the UK’s population is unhappy with the appearance of their teeth. This could be for many reasons, including crooked, discoloured or missing teeth, but these can be fixed with aesthetic dentistry.

What is white?

This may seem like a simple enough question, but everyone will have a different answer – even Colgate believes that there are 44 different shades of white. Your smile is personal to you, and only you can determine what is going to make it ‘perfect’.

When you meet a dentist experienced in aesthetic dentistry, it’s useful to discuss what it is about your smile you think needs improving or that concerns you. Once the dentist has examined you, they will be able discuss everything from the health of your teeth and gums (obviously the primary concern), to the shape, arrangement, alignment, size and colour, and what would best suit your face. Perfectly straight and brightest white is not always best and is, in fact, rarely what will look best. A natural-looking beautiful smile always looks best – after all, no one really wants their teeth to look obviously fake.

Dentist viewing smile makeover on screen

So, when you’re considering a smile makeover there are several elements to consider – it’s not just about having perfectly straight teeth. Your dentist will talk to you about the importance of balance and harmony – balancing your front and side teeth, the gum line, how to account for symmetry and the midline, and how to create a smile line that harmonises with your lip line. Their goal is to guide you in understanding what’s possible in order to get to your desired result.

Aesthetic vs. cosmetic

If you’ve started researching your smile makeover, you’ve probably encountered the terms ‘cosmetic dentistry’ and ‘aesthetic dentistry’.

There is some cross-over in what these terms mean, but typically aesthetic dentistry is enhancing your smile through treatment that would be considered necessary, i.e. where treatment is needed for correction of a problem with your teeth and gums. This could be anything from the tooth alignment, problems with the health and structure of your teeth and gums, or where there is damage to the teeth and gums through disease, trauma or breakdown of existing dental work.

Cosmetic dentistry is concerned with being unhappy with existing work or wanting to replace and improve old dental work such as crowns, veneers or bridges that may not be particularly aesthetic or are looking a bit worse for wear. Even when you need extensive dentistry or a full mouth rehabilitation, then the aim would be to enhance and optimise the aesthetics of your smile whilst achieving a beautiful natural-looking result.

Cosmetic dentistry is more about changing your smile when there are no real issues or clinical problems that need treatment, but its more about improving or enhancing the appearance. It’s sometimes referred to as the ‘Hollywood’ smile. Unfortunately, when not done well, the results of treatment can sometimes look unnatural or artificial. There are good and bad examples of this when we see celebrities in the media.

Whether aesthetic or cosmetic, they often achieve the same thing – the end goal is always to create YOUR perfect smile, whatever that looks like.

For your dentist, the priority is always going to be giving you a healthy, beautiful smile in the way that is going to create the least damage to your teeth and keep your teeth and gums healthy in the long term.

Achieving your perfect smile

Aesthetic and cosmetic dentistry is becoming more common, and there are many dental practices offering these services across the country. But rather than choose the closest dentist to you, it’s worth looking for a practice with the expertise and experience to take care of your most important asset. It is crucial to pick a practice where the team are thinking of treatment that will be in your best interests in the long term, and not just a short term ‘quick fix’.

You want to be confident that your smile is going to last without causing any issues, pain or discomfort in a few years’ time. A good way to secure this confidence is when your dentist has been practising somewhere for several years and has built up a good reputation from seeing their successes, learning from their failures, and maintaining great smiles long-term.

At the Windsor Centre for Advanced Dentistry, we follow a multi-specialist plan to:

  • Always perform work that is in the patient’s best interests.
  • Create a healthy smile with the least invasive approach.
  • Ensure predictable and manageable long-term success.

Our team of dentists all have extensive experience working at the highest levels. All the team have over 10 years’ experience and some over 30 years.

Life-changing dentistry

If you’re not 100% happy with your smile, you owe it to yourself to do something about it. Take a look at the dental issues we can solve to discover what treatments are available for your teeth.

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