“Drop-Dead Gorgeous” isn’t a description typically utilized when dentures are the subject.  Everyone has seen them, dentures that “look like dentures”.  They don’t look right, they don’t feel right, they slip and fall out and typically anyone can tell they aren’t really your teeth.  This is more often than not the situation, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  A denture can and should look just like a person’s natural teeth.  Like the old hair color commercial said “Only her hairdresser knows for sure”, is what it should be like for a person with dentures “Only their dentist knows for sure”!

Why then don’t all dentures look and feel wonderful?  The reason is that custom made dentures take a lot of time, effort and patience to personalize.  Think about it, for a denture to be ideal, it must provide a solid bite and function, it must be stable, it has to provide beautiful esthetics and on top of that they have to be comfortable - a tall order in many situations.  I must admit (as I am sure many dentists will) that before I started doing a lot of the work myself on personalized custom-dentures, patients without teeth used to not be a lot of fun.  Not because the patients were bad, but rather the dentures always seemed to have problems.  We put in all this effort to take records and models of a patient and then it’s in the hands of a lab technician to produce great results.  There are some wonderful lab technicians out there, but in their defense, they are trying to place teeth on an articulator (artificial jaw) without the patient being there with them.  They are placing teeth in a denture without being able to see how the lips are positioned, are the teeth too short or too long, is the midline of the teeth aligned with the midline of the face, is too much or too little “gum tissue” showing, does it provide adequate lip and cheek support, are the teeth slanted, etc.  All of these factors (and others) are critical to the success of a denture.

As with anything, some people aren’t concerned about the look of their teeth – they just want to be able to eat.  But, I have found over the years though that function follows form (beauty).  If the teeth look natural, they typically work better.  All dentures are, to a degree, “custom”, but there are significant differences when they are personalized.  I have found if a dentist personally chooses and places at least the front 8 teeth in a denture with the patient there in the chair the results are outstanding.  It’s a lot easier to send it all to the lab, but often the results are disappointing if done that way.  I’m not saying it can’t all be done at the lab, but at least for me (and other dentists I know) better results can be attained if the patient is intimately involved in the process of how the teeth look.  If it is all done at the lab, they often have little say in the result.

There is nothing better or more efficient than the natural teeth the good Lord gave you.  If you still have teeth, it is vitally important to your overall health to do everything you can to keep all the teeth you have.  All that said, dentures are already a reality for some and may be in the future for others.  If this is the situation, dentures don’t have to be a constant source of constant misery, concern or embarrassment.  God bless and have a great week.