Shelby Township Dentist Discusses Dark Lines at Gum Line
Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re located in Shelby Township, Michigan. I wanted to talk a little bit today about what a lot of our patients have questions about. Their crowns, or caps on their front teeth. Crowns and caps are the same sort of thing.
The questions are about their front teeth and they have some dark lines up at the gum line. We’ve been getting a lot of questions as to what those dark lines are. Are those fillings that I have in my teeth? They weren’t there before but now I have them. My neighbor has dark lines at their gum lines, what are those dark lines? The dark lines are most likely, especially if you have crowns or caps on your teeth, those crowns are made out of porcelain with a metal understructure. That metal is a combination of gold and silver and platinum, and palladium.
Maybe if those crowns have been on there for a while. The gums start to recede a little bit and you start to see that little shadow of dark metal, that little metal band that’s up at your gum line. People want to know how we can fix that for them. This is part of cosmetic dentistry that we get to do. Usually they are perfectly fine, functionally those crowns are perfectly fine. People just don’t like how they look aesthetically, cosmetically. They say people have said something to me; I just don’t like the appearance of them.
One of the ways that we can fix that is we remove the crown that’s on there and we place a new crown that’s all porcelain or maybe has some zirconia in it. Either all porcelain or a zirconia crown, do not have any metal under-structure. We are able to remove that metal under structure to give them the smile that they’ve always wanted and that they’re confident in, one that they’re proud to smile with.
If you look at our web site, HPS Dental.com, we have a lot of before and after pictures. In some of those pictures you’ll be able to see that dark line up at the gum line. Then we replace those old porcelain fused to metal crowns with a new all porcelain or porcelain fused to zirconia crown.
Shelby Township Dentist Discusses Dark Lines at Gum Line
So if you have any questions for us about types of crowns or cosmetic dentistry, aesthetic dentistry, give our office a call at 248-652-0024.
