Your Halifax Invisalign® Provider
Dental Planning
The first step in helping a patient achieve their goals for their smile is discussing those goals and your current smile during a consultation. They then work with the tools they have to accomplish these goals.
Our dentists at Scotia Dental know that your smile reflects who you are and how you communicate. So, there are many factors that should be considered when starting this journey toward your straighter brighter smile. In this post, you'll learn that cosmetic dental work involves more than just applying whitening gel and letting it set or placing a veneer over a tooth.
How do patients' expectations factor in?
A patient's goals and expectations are the highest priorities to consider before any treatment. We inquire about our patient's primary complaints and concerns to that a custom treatment plan can be created to lead to a final outcome that patients will appreciate.
After thoroughly assessing your goals and challenges, the dentist will offer treatment options and anticipated outcomes with you to help you make an informed decision about treatment. This allows for your input, and you can ask any questions you may have.
With the help of dental technology such as dental X-rays, our Halifax dentists can create extremely detailed, accurate renditions of your teeth. With digital X-rays, we can use these to accurately assess oral structures and diagnose any conditions. With panoramic X-rays, we can generate a single image of your entire mouth - which is particularly useful to get an accurate picture of your overall oral health before looking into treatment options.
This allows our patients to feel more confident in their treatment plans.
What are the factors dentists consider?
There are a number of things that your dentist will need to consider when mapping out your treatment plan and visualizing the end result. Some of these factors include:
Facial Aesthetics - The overall assessment of the smile must begin from a visual standpoint. Facial features and proportions are key factors in how your smile is going to look. Your dentist will look for asymmetries in the facial features. Notable concerns with symmetry can be an indication of skeletal or growth and development issues that may or may not have an impact on the patient's smiles.
Tooth Position - Current tooth position is an incredibly important aspect that needs to be assessed. Without proper evaluation, this can lead to the dentist attempting to obtain ideal results unsuccessfully when the tooth or root is improperly angled or is in the wrong position.
Upper Lip Length, Lip Position, Mobility, and Symmetry - Your lips play an important role when it comes to the look of your smile because they create the boundary for your smile. Overall lip mobility is simply the movement of the lips at rest to the farthest position that occurs when the patient smiles spontaneously and is directly related to the upper lip length. The overall symmetry of the patient’s lip mobility must be assessed since there is a significant portion of the patient population that has asymmetry of movement of upper and lower lips. This can lead to more teeth and/ or gum displayed on one side versus the other, creating disharmony in the overall smile of the patient.
Incisal Edge Position - The incisal (front teeth) edge position must also be evaluated in relation to the surrounding tissues as well. Generally, your front teeth should be parallel to your pupils.
Midline - The position of the teeth, and the dental midline in regard to the facial midline has to be assessed during the smile evaluation. It is important to evaluate the relationship of the dental midline to the facial midline in addition to the overall angle of the midline. If there are slight differences in the midline angle, it can be quite noticeable to many people.
Tooth Proportions - Overall tooth proportions are another key and critically important assessment that must be made by your dentist during the initial examination.
Microesthetics - Your dentist needs to assess and discuss the final color or shade you desire. Ideally, they will select a shade that is naturally pleasing but aesthetically enhancing. The dentist should also communicate to the lab technician about desired facial surface texture, overall incisal translucency, additional tooth characteristics including incisal effects, embrasures, tooth shape, and variations in value and hue.
