What are Empress veneers made of?

Q. Empress veneers; are they made of ceramic or porcelain and what is the diffference,would you recommend these and if not why and what would you recommend? Thank you P (Liverpool)

A. Dear P,

In answering your question I am in danger of becoming too technical. please excuse me if my answer has some dental jargon- I’ll do my best.

Firstly porcelain is a type of ceramic rather than being a separate enmity in its own right.

Secondly as to whether I would recommend Empress veneers. There are basically 2 types of porcelain veneers commonly used today - empress and feldspathic. Empress veneers are far stronger ( 3 to 6 times as strong) as feldspathic veneers as they contain a large amount of a substance called Lucite. However feldspathic veneers are generally more aesthetic due to their light properties.
If a patient has a strong bite I would be more inclined towards empress veneers where as if aesthetics were my only concern then I would be more likely to chose feldspathic.

Another consideration is how minimal I want to be in preparation of your teeth. On the whole technicians who make veneers tend to need more room for Empress veneers than feldspathic veneers and so my preparation of your teeth would have to be a little more for an empress veneers than for a feldspathic veneer.

And finally to completely confuse you Empress veneers are often overlaid with feldspathic porcelain to improve their aesthetics.
At the end of the day you need to find a dentist who truly understands material science to give you the right option for veneers for your teeth.

Dr Julian Caplan BDS
Aviva Cosmetic Dentistry
Director on the board of the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry

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Tags: dental veneers, dentist, empress veneers

This post was published on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:01 pmand is filed under Dr Caplan's Answers, Experts Answers, Q. Dental Veneers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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