What is Smile Design with Porcelain Veneers?

Gurs Sehmi
Feb 16, 2024
4 min read

Smile design is a general term for improving the appearance of your smile. Its not a specific treatment, you can think of it like "redoing your kitchen". You can have the kitchen designed to look like a magazine, but there is little information about the specifics.

But back to smiles, lets look at what is involved with this treatment, and how we carry it out at The Wraysbury Clinic.

Stage 1 - Understanding your needs

Smile design with porcelain veneers and dental implants is complex and expensive, we really need to understand your needs, i.e. what is it that you want out of this treatment.

For some people, its things like they don't like their front teeth, these are too dominant in the smile, or when you smile, certain teeth look dark and uneven.

For other people there may be more functional issues, like not being able to eat, or maybe the front teeth keep breaking, and we need to find a proper solution.

Although in this second example, the reason for treatment is less for cosmetic enhancement, but more for health and function, many of the same treatment approaches would be used.

Even for those people who are not looking for a perfect smile, if we are replacing crowns for functional reasons, we will always make them look as good as possible.

Stage 2 - The Pre-design & Treatment Planning

We can often visualise a smile because we are doing smile designs all the time, but for our patients, often all they see is a bombsite, and cannot imagine anything that looks good.

At this stage, we often educate our patients on the principles of smile design (how long teeth should be, how wide, how we measure these metrics etc.)

These are all obvious in principle, but often need to customise these for every patient. For example, we may need to compromise on the position of a midline if we are missing a front tooth, for example.

Once we know the end goal, we will then look at each tooth and discuss options, like veneers or crowns, or anything else in as much detail as is needed.

At this stage we are more clear about the treatment plan, the costs, the stages and the timescale.

Stage 3 - Trial Smile

Now, I am simplifying it a little bit here, because if your plan needs to replace missing teeth with dental implants, there are a lot of stages that I have missed (and they are different in different situations)

But once the foundations (implants) and in place and healed, we will make a temporary smile on these.

You will be able to go home, and look at this smile in the comfort of your home, ask for opinions from friends and family, and really just try out your smile as you need to.

At this stage we are looking to see if you love your smile, and to make sure you can get on with any changes in your bite.

If we need to change the look at this stage, it is very easy, and we can do this as many times as you need to, so that you are completely happy with the trial smile.

Once we are both happy, we will convert this to porcelain restorations.

Swipe the photo to see the trial smile stage

Stage 4 - Fitting your smile

With all the work that has gone in so far, this should be easy.

It should be, but over they years we have had some issues with dental labs being able to copy the shapes of our temporary veneers. It seems like a simple thing to do, but most labs will not be used to working in this way.

There is one lab that we work with that is very good at copying our smile design veneers, and there is another that is excellent at copying our all on 4 (a treatment to replace a full set of teeth with dental implants).

The right dental lab will create natural looking veneers, that have microdetails like texture that will scatter light.

If veneers are too smooth, they actually look more dull.

We will always try in half of the veneers, to ensure a good match, then fit the whole smile.

This appointment takes about 2.5h and at the end there should not be any surprises.

There are "easier" ways to have a smile design, but we feel that if someone is investing a lot of time and money into something like this, we need to ensure that they are 100% happy with the end result, and this is the only way that we have found that we can deliver this time and time again.

The close up photo below shows the microdetail, but the settings on the camera were not right, so they look a little yellow. Its actually the same smile as the other smile photos.

The photo with the writing on it is a different case, but it illustrates the to and frow that we have had with some labs, who do not understand full smile aesthetics to the detail that we do.