What’s the best material to use in the anterior?
What’s the best material to use in the anterior? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get asked this question.
My answer is always the same: It depends. In reality, there is no "best material." There are different materials for different situations.
Ideally, we want to use the most translucent material possible when restoring teeth for the optimal esthetics. A translucent material gives us the most depth and esthetics in a restoration. The more opaque the material, the less depth and lack of esthetics it contains.
Increased translucency can be good and bad. It’s good for the reason we already discussed – enhanced esthetics. It’s bad because if the underlying tooth structure is dark, then that dark tooth structure will shine through, leading to a decrease in the esthetics by showing a dark root. This is ok if the patient has a low lip line, but not so good if the patient has a high smile.
So what, then, is the "best" material to use in the anterior? I use the list below as a guideline for when you have normal and dark stumps:
NORMAL SUBSTRUCTURE:
1a Vita TriLuxe
1b Empress Multi
1c e.max HT
2 Vita Real Life (Single tooth only)
3 Vita TriLuxe Forte (older patients with dark cervicals)
4 e.max LT
DARK SUBSTRUCTURE:
1 e.max LT
2 Vita TriLuxe Forte
I am assuming that if you choose a block for the darkess stump then you would carry that throughout the rest of the preps. Is this correct?
