Lumineers and veneers are ceramic caps which are glued to the outside of the teeth for aesthetic purposes.
Veneers are somewhat thicker than lumineers.
Due to advances in materials, it is now possible to produce super-thin, shatter-proof ceramic caps. Veneers kept getting thinner and thinner, until professionals began to call them lumineers, as the ceramic cups were almost „transparent“.
The problem is that ads for these thin lumineers claim that no drilling is necessary.
This is wrong, as whether it is necessary to drill or not depends not on how thick a ceramic cap is, but on the placement of the teeth.
We would like to illustrate this in the picture on the left. The top picture shows a tooth sector. The first incisor on the left is slightly twisted, so that one corner is outside of the sector and the other corner is inside. In the picture below you can see the area, highlighted in red, where the tooth needs to be sanded down slightly so that the lumineer (in blue) can be applied to get a beautiful smile.
The second tooth on the right is deep inside the tooth sector, and there is no need to drill here, all that is needed is a „thicker“ ceramic cap (in green) – also known as a veneer.
Whether it is necessary to drill depends on the placement of your teeth, their coloring, and what exactly you hope to accomplish!
Click here to watch a video on this procedure!
