For some reason I stumbled on a website on porcelain veneers. All these people got them and they were spending $8,000-$16,000 bucks for the procedure. Holy crap!
I’m not a dental professional so I don’t know how the process of making a veneer to fit a tooth works entirely, but is it really that hard and labor intensive to make and attach a veneer that it costs (according to some sources) $1,000 or more per tooth?
How hard it is to shave down a piece of porcelain and glue it onto someone’s tooth? (Okay, I really oversimplified it and probably got the process completely wrong there).
Tooth repair using composite resin is less expensive, but the material does not have as long a life span as porcelain and will likely require periodic touch ups.
It’s largely hand work by skilled artisans. The material has to be sculpted to fit, and colored “just so” so it looks like a tooth instead of an artificial replacement, plus the work at the dentist’s office to produce the molds of the person’s mouth, and then to atach them properly so they stay on.
Add to this the fact that it’s being put into someone’s body, and the costs add up quickly.
$1000 per tooth is about right if not a little on the low side. I got one on a front tooth this year because of excessive chipping. Getting it done requires a full set of X-rays, a full dental exam and cleaning, filing down the original tooth so that the veneer can fit over it, bonding the tooth with a temporary cap, color and shape matching, preparing the mold, sending the mold off to the lab to have a custom veneer made, and a second trip to the dentist to remove the temporary bonding and gluing the permanent veneer in place.
It is an intensive procedures that requires lots of artistic and technical skill to get good results. With all of the people involved, I was surprised that it was as cheap as it was. My results were great. As soon as the veneer was glued in place, you couldn’t tell that it was not an original tooth no matter how close you looked. The color and shape matched a natural tooth perfectly. Life expectancy of a porcelain veneer is at least 15 years and possibly much longer with proper care and basic precautions. Teeth bonded with resin are cheaper don’t last nearly as long and can chip at any time.
I suspect a lot of models/actors get their entire mouths done, either that or they have had the most impeccable tooth maintenance procedure since their final teeth came in.
Some of these people’s smile literally blind you.
Dentist here. Veneers are both art and science. No it isn’t really that hard to do but it is hard to do very well. Poor ones look like veneers good ones look like teeth. There is a fair amount of overhead in a veneer. Two appointments, lab fees, materials etc. Also, like medical cosmetic procedures people will pay more for something they want v. something they don’t want.