The Cost of Having Perfect Teeth
Christian Chanel didn’t know that she grinds her teeth in her sleep—until the first night after she got her porcelain veneers, because she promptly cracked her left front tooth. “I was scared out of my mind,” Chanel, who’s in her late 20s, tells SELF. “I was like, What the heck is going on? I just spent all this money, and crap, I grind my teeth. At that point, it was too late to turn back.”
Chanel is lucky. She has a good relationship with her dentist. And that relationship came in handy when she chipped the same tooth two more times in a two-year period, from 2020 when she first got her veneers done until 2023 when her dentist made a series of adjustments to her dental work—which also included crowns (a tooth-shaped cap placed on top of a damaged tooth) and dental implants (medical devices surgically inserted into the jaw to support artificial replacements for missing or damaged teeth). To complicate her veneer aftercare even further, Chanel has temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD), a term for a group of conditions that trigger pain and dysfunction in either of the jaw joints and/or the surrounding muscles. “It would always be the nights when I was just too lazy to put my retainer in, or I just forgot for some reason,” Chanel says. “Like clockwork, I would wake up and my tooth would be chipped.” When applied and taken care of properly, veneers can last for more than a decade. Two different kinds are widely used in cosmetic dentistry: composite veneers, which are made out of resin and bonded directly to the teeth after the teeth are “prepared” via shaving and reshaping; and porcelain veneers, which are generally made-to-order in a lab and tend to require more of that “preparation” of the natural teeth they’re placed over.
Veneers can come with major health risks
Let’s talk about the spiky elephant in the room: “shark teeth,” or teeth prepped for veneers to the point that they’re effectively nubs. Removing a certain amount of a tooth’s structure, specifically enamel, is almost always a part of veneer application. But according to Dr. Davis, it’s all too easy for things to go too far. “There are really good aesthetic dentists who try to prep the teeth minimally,” he says. “Then, there are dentists who over-prepare the tooth, and remove more tooth structure than is absolutely necessary and cause permanent damage.” He adds that social media has raised awareness of how extreme that preparation process can be. Because there are videos all over TikTok of folks who end up with whittled-down teeth, “people watching are like, ‘Whoa, I don’t want that,’” he says.