What are Crowns?

Crowns are a cosmetic restoration used to strengthen a tooth or improve its shape. Crowns are most often used for teeth that are broken, worn, or partially destroyed by tooth decay.

How Crowns Work

Crowns are “cemented” onto an existing tooth and fully cover the portion of your tooth above the gum line. In effect, the crown becomes your tooth’s new outer surface. Crowns can be made of porcelain, metal, or both. Porcelain crowns are most often preferred because they mimic the translucency of natural teeth and are very strong.

Crowns or onlays (partial crowns) are needed when there is insufficient tooth strength remaining to hold a filling. Unlike fillings which apply the restorative material directly into your mouth, a crown is fabricated away from your mouth. Your crown is created in a lab from your unique tooth impression which allows a dental laboratory technician to examine all aspects of your bite and jaw movements. Your crown is then sculpted just for you so that your bite and jaw movements function normally once the crown is placed.

Caps and Crowns Metal and Porcelain

You might have heard of caps. You might think well what's the difference between a cap and a crown? They are basically the same. Some people refer to crowns on front teeth as caps but, in essence, they are really the same thing.

Over the years, there has been an evolution of many generations of crowns. Have you ever seen somebody that has crowns on their front teeth and they have bluish looking gums, almost as if they're bruised? That's because crowns used to have metal underneath them and porcelain would cover the metal. They were made to attempt to hide the metal underneath, but there was always that fine line with the crown end. Covering the metal can be challenging, so often times what would be done is cutting back the tooth a little more, remove a little more tooth structure and then build the porcelain out to try to hide the metal. This worked fairly well, it was a little more difficult to do, but now we have all-ceramic crowns. With these crowns, there is no bluing of the gums and there's no metal that shows because there is no metal in the crown. They are all ceramic, they are very strong and look beautiful. It makes them look like they grew there.