Hiding Craze Lines on Your Teeth—Can Bonding Help?
Posted on: 22 August 2018
As teeth age, they often show signs of crazing. When this happens, tiny cracks or lines appear on the surface of a tooth. Typically, craze lines only sit on your enamel and won't deepen or get worse, so they don't need any treatment. Over time, however, you may start to notice your crazing more, and it may make you self-conscious about the way your teeth look to other people. Bonding treatments may be a solution — how can they help?
What Is Bonding?
Dentists use bonding to make small repairs to teeth. These repairs can be structural, say if you chip a tooth, or cosmetic. The process involves using a soft resin that works kind of like a white filling. The resin is colour-matched to your teeth, so it blends in with your enamel colour. It is applied tooth while it is soft and is then moulded into position. Finally, your dentist hardens the resin to make it strong.
How Does Bonding Fix Craze Lines?
Bonding is a useful cosmetic tool for dentists as it can be used to cover up problems like some stains or defects in the tooth that don't look so good. So, if you feel that your craze lines are too visible, you can ask your dentist to use bonding to make them look better.
During this treatment, your dentist applies bonding to your craze lines. The bonding resin can fill in the lines or cracks or cover them over, or both. Once the bonding is hardened, your tooth should look smooth and crack-free again and you shouldn't be able to see the crazing.
Things to Consider
It's important to talk things through with your dentist before you use bonding to fix crazing. While this is a quick and effective solution, it won't necessarily last forever. Bonding can also stain over time, so it's worth discussing how stains on the bonding might make your tooth look in the future. A stained line of bonding over a craze line won't look great; however, your dentist may opt to cover the whole tooth to avoid parts of it standing out if stains do appear.
Bear in mind that bonding doesn't damage your tooth, so you can always give this a go and opt for a different treatment later if it doesn't work for you. Alternatively, you can visit a cosmetic dentistry clinic and talk to a dentist about other ways to deal with standout craze lines such as veneers.
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