Composite Fillings
Many people have at least one or two fillings, and in the past, these restorations were often made from amalgam, a silver-coloured metal that, although hard-wearing, can discolour over time.
Nowadays, tooth-coloured composite resin fillings can replace amalgam restorations, restoring teeth nearly invisibly.
What Is Composite Resin?
Composite resin is a tooth-coloured material that is a mixture of plastic and silicon dioxide, a type of glass.
The resin bonds strongly with your natural tooth and closely mimics this tooth structure, making it very biocompatible.
It is relatively hard-wearing and comes in a huge range of shades, so our dentists can closely match the colour of your filling to the colour of your natural tooth.
When to Choose Composite Resin Fillings?
Composite resin fillings can be used to mend small to medium-sized cavities in your back teeth, restoring strength and structure to these teeth.
When repairing these cavities, we only need to remove the damaged portions, leaving all the healthy tooth structure intact, so it is a more conservative treatment than amalgam fillings.
We can use composite resin to mend small chips and cracks in teeth, creating a more cosmetically perfect appearance in a process called dental bonding.
Composite resin can recontour teeth that may be too small or that are a less than aesthetically pleasing shape. It can be used to cover teeth that are severely stained and which may not respond to a teeth whitening treatment, for example, if these stains are internal.
Many people have gaps between their teeth, and composite resin can help to close or minimise the size of these gaps. We can also use composite resin to create a more perfectly aligned smile.
For example, composite resin can reshape and straighten teeth if you have one or two teeth that are rotated and not quite in the right place.
What Is the Procedure for Composite Fillings?
If we are filling a cavity, we will numb the tooth so we can carefully reshape the cavity to receive the filling material. If we are bonding a tooth, it may be unnecessary to numb it first, and we might only need to prepare the tooth surface to ensure a good bond between the composite resin and the tooth.
The composite resin is then placed into the cavity or onto the tooth and is hardened before our dentist carefully shapes and polishes it, resulting in a natural-looking restoration.
If you currently have older amalgam fillings and would prefer to replace them with a composite resin, please talk to our dentists during your next visit to Shire Dental.