Got a chipped tooth? Houston dental bonding brings the care you need to bring back the luster of your smile. Chipping a tooth can be a painful experience and leave you with a noticeable break in your smile. Dental bonding fixes this by restoring the chipped tooth to look like nothing ever happened.
Houston Dental Bonding – What is it?
You might be asking yourself: “What is dental bonding?” Quite simply, it is a method of bonding a tooth fragment to the original tooth. In some cases, bonding also improves the look of discolored teeth and teeth damaged by decay.
The primary purpose of dental bonding is restorative dentistry. It reconstructs a damaged tooth so that it functions and looks as good as it did before needing bonding. Most times, patients needing bonding will need to fix a suddenly broken tooth. This happens most often as the result of an accidental trauma to the mouth.
A sudden, blunt force to the teeth can cause them to chip or break. Additionally, chewing on hard foods like ice or popcorn seeds can also break a tooth. When a piece of a tooth breaks off, it’s known as a chip or chipped tooth. When the tooth remains together but has a split in it, it is a fracture or fractured tooth.
In both cases, the location of the break may experience pain. This is due to the nerves of the tooth becoming exposed. With fractured teeth, it may not hurt most of the time, but when your mouth opens/closes or when something pushes on the tooth, it can result in a sudden sharp pain. This is caused by the fracture widening at some point, putting stress on the rest of the tooth and nerves.
How Does Houston Dental Bonding Work?
Dental bonding secures (or replaces) the chipped part of a tooth and joins fractured teeth together. The actual bonding material looks like a syrupy resin when applied. It coats the exposed portion of the break, then the dentist presses the tooth together. Your Houston dentist then “cures” the bond, meaning that they harden it.
Most of the time, dental bonding does not require the use of anesthesia, unless you also need a filling. To prepare the tooth, the surface needs roughing up. A rough surface on the tooth makes it much easier for the bond to set into place and hold tight. After this, the dentist coats the tooth with the resin bond. They can shape the bond to match the rest of the tooth as needed. This is especially useful when using the dental bond to replace a chipped piece of tooth rather than repairing it.
The dentist uses ultraviolet light to cure the resin, hardening and strengthening it. The whole bonding process takes about 30-60 minutes per tooth, depending on how much bonding is necessary. While not as durable as a permanent restoration like dental bridges, bonding is one of the least expensive restorative methods.