What should you do if your veneer comes off your tooth?
Whenever your porcelain veneer comes off, it is usually a big shock and a massive nuisance. Here is what you should do as soon as your all porcelain veneer happens to come off.
The very first thing to do is to put the porcelain veneer in a safe place. We have seen so many patients who forget where they put their porcelain veneer by the time they go back to the dentist. So our advice is to find a box such as a tiny jewellery box which is also cushioned. The veneer can be placed in there and even if it moves about slightly whilst you go back to your dentist, the cushioning will protect it from accidentally chipping, fracturing or breaking. You need to write down somewhere prominent such as on the fridge as to where you put the porcelain veneer. This is simply so that you don’t forget where you placed the porcelain veneer.
Needless to say, you need to go to have the veneer back on by your dentist. In the meantime, you should try to clean the underlying natural tooth as much as you can and even better than you normally do. This is to prevent any bacteria launching on the surface of the tooth which will feel rough now. In addition, you should also floss in between as you normally would do anyway.
If you are at all tempted to place the veneer back on yourself then you need to be aware of several things. Firstly, you should not try to put the veneer back on yourself but if you do then it is likely that you will end up having to have a new veneer made at additional cost. This is because if you do try to put the veneer back on using household glue or a home kit that you can buy from a chemist or on the Internet, it is highly likely that you will not be positioning the veneer back on the tooth in exactly the same way as it was originally placed by the dentist. Also due to the glue that you are using, this glue may not come back off again without drilling and this means that the tooth shape under the veneer is now changed. This necessitates a new veneer accordingly. Even if you try to put the veneer back on, you risk either breaking the veneer as you are placing it back on or you may even drop the veneer causing damage to it. Once you have even managed to put the veneer back on, any excess veneer glue will need to be cleaned off and this is almost impossible to do at home. On the other hand if you don’t add enough glue on, there will be microgaps under the veneer which bacteria can gain entry to causing decay.
So in short, you should only be trying to put the veneer back on to your tooth as a very last resort such as not being able to find a dentist within a short period of time.
You should ideally try to find a dentist within 24 to 48 hours of when the porcelain veneer comes off.
When you do take the old veneer to your dentist, it is quite an involved procedure. Firstly, the dentist needs to check to make sure that the veneer has not been damaged. Even a small hairline fracture means that the porcelain veneer cannot be reused. The surface of the tooth will need to be re-etched using 35% phosphoric acid and the surface of the veneer will also need to be re-etched using hydrofluoric acid. Once the surface of the veneer and the tooth is clean and dry, a bonding agent is used together into porcelain veneer cement to put back onto your tooth because it was there in the first place. Any excess veneer cement is then removed and the veneer repolished to make it perfect again.