Cosmetic Dentistry in Minot, ND

Aesthetics versus function. That’s basically the difference between cosmetic dentistry and general dentistry. Most people associate the dentist with placing fillings and bridges, maybe replacing a missihttps://mybroadwayfamilydentistry.com/services/cosmetic-dentistry/ng tooth with a dental implant. Those kinds of dental treatments are all about keeping your oral health in good shape: they’re addressing functional problems.

Cosmetic dentistry is concerned with the aesthetic appearance of your teeth and overall smile. Cosmetic treatments may seek to whiten stained teeth or use composite resin bonding to mask a chipped tooth. Goals can overlap, for instance, a crown can save a tooth with heavy decay, but a crown can also completely change the aesthetic shape of a misshapen tooth. Cosmetic dentistry has the goal of giving you a dazzling smile without addressing overall oral health and function problems such as gum disease or decay. At Broadway, we use cosmetic dentistry within general dentistry to improve patients’ tooth shape, whiteness, alignment, and overall appearance in addition to improving functional problems and patients’ oral health.

Those flaws we mentioned above, we all have them. It could be a slight gap between your two front teeth, or you could have a chipped tooth. You could even be missing a tooth that you knocked out in a Minot pond hockey game and never bothered replacing.

That’s where Dr. Jensen can use various cosmetic treatments to camouflage flaws. These are some common flaws that cosmetic dentistry would improve:

• Fixing a chipped tooth
• Whitening a badly stained tooth/teeth
• Applying veneers to make the teeth more uniform
• Fixing a gummy smile
• Closing a gap between teeth
• Changing the shape of a tooth
• Lengthening the crown of an overly short tooth
• Covering badly pitted teeth

To be eligible to have our Broadway Family Dentistry team give you a perfect smile with cosmetic treatments, you need to start with healthy teeth. Remember, these are only cosmetic improvements.

If you have problems such as gum disease or you have a tooth or teeth with decay, those issues would need to be addressed before you could even consider cosmetic treatments.

But if you have cosmetic issues such as stains from tetracycline you were given as a kid, cosmetic dentistry is the way to overcome them. If only a tooth or two is stained, we could use composite resin bonding or even maybe a single veneer. If your staining is widespread, a full set of porcelain veneers may cover it and give you a brilliant whiter smile.

Cosmetic dentistry can give you a beautiful smile, and who wouldn’t like that?

At Broadway Family Dentistry, we use a variety of different procedures to give our patients the brightest, most beautiful smiles.

• Composite Fillings — We place only composite resin fillings, which are the color of your natural teeth and camouflage once in your tooth.
• Porcelain restorations — Porcelain veneers or crowns are placed over the teeth. They can change the color or shape of the teeth. They can correct unevenly spaced, crooked, chipped, oddly shaped, or badly discolored teeth.
• Gum contouring — We can use our dental laser to reduce gummy smiles without the pain or recovery necessary with typical incisions and sutures.
• Bonding — Composite resin can be used to fix a flaw on a tooth, such as a chip. Or it can change the shape of a single tooth. Bonding is less expensive than a porcelain veneer, but it doesn’t last as long.
• Whitening — At Broadway, we use our Er:YAG laser to activate professional whitening gel for our one-hour, in-office whitening treatments. We also offer at-home teeth whitening custom-fit trays and professional gel.
• Dental implants — While you could really categorize a dental implant as a general dentistry procedure, it also improves the appearance of your smile. You can use an implant to replace a missing tooth or a tooth that is so badly damaged it will need to be extracted.

The answer to that is, “It depends.” Replacing a silver amalgam filling with composite resin is not expensive at all, and the tooth will immediately get lighter/brighter afterward. Teeth whitening can whiten your teeth up to eight shades, and it isn’t expensive. Porcelain veneers covering all of your visible teeth is a larger investment, whereas dental bonding on a single tooth or two is less.

So, it depends on what treatments you would like to have. Once you give us a good idea of the areas you’d like to improve, we can give you an estimate of the cost.

Dental insurance coverage varies widely by the company and the plan. Most dental insurance is meant to help with twice-yearly preventative cleanings and exams, but not elective procedures. Cosmetic treatments are considered elective, so they are usually not covered.