My front tooth is broken, discolored, looks different than the tooth beside it—it just doesn’t look nice.
It looks like you need a crown or a veneer.
By the 1960s, it became increasingly possible to restore teeth to highly aesthetic renditions of the originals. As with an inlay (mentioned in a previous article), a dental crown begins with a dentist preparing the friendless tooth before taking impressions and sending them off to be fabricated by a ceramicist in a dental laboratory.
In order to cap a tooth, its size is reduced to the point that something else can fit over the original in all dimensions—as with buying a new hat, for example, an uncomfortable fit just wouldn’t do. Teeth are prepared systematically, such that each surface is typically reduced by 1 to 2 millimeters. Of course, if a tooth has broken down from decay or trauma, much of that reduction is already done. If too much structure has been lost, a filling can be used to bring the preparation back to an ideal shape. Any undercut or indentation in the lower part of a preparation must be filled, as the resulting bump reproduced in the finished crown would make for an impossible fit….