Lumineers are a brand of porcelain veneers made by Den-Mat Corporation. They are a little thinner than some other porcelain veneers, so the company claim is that they can be bonded over the top of your teeth with little or no drilling. This makes them seem very easy to place and therefore something that more dentists would be able to do in their practices with minimal training.

Advantages of Lumineers are:

• No temporary veneers are required while you wait for the permanent ones to be made in the dental lab, because your teeth have not been noticeably shaped.
• Little drilling is required on the teeth themselves.
• The procedure might be reversible because little or no tooth structure is removed.

In certain circumstances, Lumineers do simplify the placement of the porcelain veneers, but in most cases there are complexities that exist. They do not lend themselves to an oversimplification of the process of a smile makeover. Properly placing porcelain veneers requires the hand of an artist, to properly design them for the variables that present themselves, such as the shape of the face, the positioning of the existing teeth and the desires of the patient.

When there is minimal shaping of the teeth, the smile design process actually becomes more complicated. Now the dentist is confined to working with the shapes of the teeth the way they are. Color of the veneers also becomes more complicated because the veneer is thinner. Hue, chroma translucency, color selection and brightness all need to be taken into account for you to have a beautiful smile.

Most people that choose to enhance their smile with porcelain veneers want to have the best possible result. Dentistry is best if handled by someone with exceptional training, experience, and talent. The best results are not achieved when the majority of the decisions are made by the lab and the dentist doesn’t take the proper care in placing the veneers.

The bottom line is that Lumineers (thin feldspathic porcelain) are appropriate for some people. In certain circumstances, they can be a good option for improving your smile. The best types of situations are those with good alignment of the teeth and minimal color change.