Porcelain Crowns

With 28 years of experience, Dr. Peter Harnois uses the most aesthetic and biocompatible materials on the market today.

PORCELAIN FULL COVEREGE CROWNS CHICAGO

Your Life Smiles offers state-of-the-art IPS Empress e.max, ZirCAD and Lava All Porcelain Crowns—a new standard in cosmetic dentistry.

That standard is founded in the strength, esthetic, and efficiency these crowns provide. Each crown’s fabrication makes them extremely durable and provides outstanding natural results.

Full-coverage crowns offer maximum coverage, saving 2 to 3 mm of dentin, with minimum invasion. The creation of a beautiful smile often includes porcelain crowns rather than the prototypical porcelain veneer restoration. Preexisting large fillings or crowns, a history of teeth grinding, challenging ‘bite’ problems and significant lengthening of teeth are some of the reasons why a crown would be preferred. Crowns without a metal core inside offer the best esthetics because of the way they reflect light and the ability to manage the dark (blue) line that can be present at the gumline edge of porcelain fused to metal crown.

Based on 28 years of experience, Dr. Harnois finds the best results are achieved with All Porcelain Empress and “Lava” Crowns. Lava crowns offer considerable strength over the typical all porcelain crowns due to an inner core made from zirconium. This core is ‘milled’ through a CAD/CAM process and is carried out at only a select few dental laboratories in Southern California. Historically; porcelain crowns were significantly weaker than conventional PFM (porcelain fused to metal) crowns and cosmetic dentists were concerned about them breaking. Also, if the underlying tooth was dark, the typical all porcelain crowns might show this darkness through the crown, making it difficult to match adjacent teeth properly. The strength and transparency issues are addressed with Lava crowns. Metal-based crowns have also been known to erode along the gum line, exposing a dark line of metal at the base of the tooth.

At Your LifeSmiles, we use only metal-free crowns in our restorative dentistry procedures. Our Chicago patients often report that friends and family can’t tell their crowns from their natural teeth, and that they are confident their bite is stronger because of the porcelain crowns.