Dentures and Dentist

An Uneven Smile: When Your Teeth Are Irregularly Sized

29 July 2019

Julian Andrews

You probably wouldn't want your teeth to all be the exact same size and shape, unless your style guru happens to be a cartoon character (which is not always the best look for real life). Teeth are (and should be) different sizes and shapes which reflect their particular role. Your incisors are sharp, sometimes with a pointed tip, in order to tear food. Your molars are flat and square so that they can chew food, mashing it up before it's swallowed. So while your teeth should have natural variations in their shapes and sizes, what about when there are too many variations? Irregularly shaped teeth might be shiny and white, and in robust health, so it's essentially just a cosmetic problem. Luckily, it's not a difficult problem to solve.

Crowns

Cosmetic dentistry offers a number of solutions for when your teeth are too irregular in their respective shapes and sizes. While your perfect smile might not have occurred naturally, it could be manufactured in a dental lab. Dental crowns can be made to achieve the desired level of uniformity. Your teeth will have a small amount of their surface area removed in order to better host the crown, which is then cemented over the tooth. The downside to dental crowns is their cost, but in many cases, teeth irregularities can also be corrected by a process known as recontouring.

Recontouring

Dental recontouring is an umbrella term that describes the reshaping of teeth. Your dentist can simply shave off a wafer-thin amount of the tooth, shaping each tooth individually until they have been sufficiently resized. It's a fairly simply procedure, and can often be accomplished in a single visit. The utmost care is given so that the dental pulp (the nerve inside each tooth) is still contained within the tooth, which means that recontouring isn't painful.

Cement

When it's impossible to remove any mass from your teeth (such as when the issue is that your teeth are too small to begin with), your dentist can use dental cement to add bulk to the tooth, again shaping the compound to the appropriate dimensions. The cement then dries and those irregularities have now disappeared. 

Teeth that are irregularly shaped are a cosmetic problem, but this doesn't diminish the seriousness of the issue, especially when it comes to your self-confidence. But whether it's via crowns, recontouring, or cement, your teeth can easily be corrected with professional cosmetic dentistry.

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