My Approach to Veneers: Taking Away As Little As Possible

Veneers are the treatment I’m asked about most, and they’re some of my favourite work. They can transform a smile — but how they’re done varies enormously between dentists, and that variation matters more than most patients realise. So in this piece I want to walk you through exactly how I approach them, as if you’d come to see me about changing your smile.

This is the second piece in my BDS Dental series, and the theme running through it — through all my work, really — is doing as much as possible while removing as little of your natural tooth as I can.

Why I’m so conservative with the tooth underneath

There’s an old way of doing veneers that involves shaving a significant amount of healthy tooth away to make room for the veneer. I don’t work that way. I’m very minimal with how much tooth I remove, because your natural tooth is precious and you don’t get it back.

These days there are very thin contact veneers that require only a minimal reduction of your own tooth, and where a case suits that approach, it’s a wonderful thing — you get the result with far less sacrifice of healthy structure. Whether it’s a full set or just a couple of teeth, my instinct is always the same: minimal preparation, conservative reduction, as much of your own tooth preserved as the result allows.

This is also, incidentally, why I tend to choose veneers over simple composite bonding for many cosmetic cases. In my experience composite bonding chips and stains over time, and for a lot of the patients I see, the ongoing maintenance is simply too much. Veneers, done well, give a more accurate, more durable result that lasts — and that longevity is part of being conservative too, because a result that holds up means less repeat intervention down the line.

How a larger case actually runs

For a bigger cosmetic case — and these are often ten teeth across the top, sometimes ten on the bottom as well — I like to take my time and do it in stages. Rushing this kind of work helps no one. Here’s roughly how it goes.

First, I take a scan or a mould of your teeth and a set of photographs, and I produce a digital smile design — a proper plan of what your new smile could look like. That design goes off to the lab, who create a stent so we can trial the design in your mouth and you can actually see and feel it. That trial is invaluable, both for you and for me — it turns an abstract idea into something real before any tooth is touched.

If you’re happy to proceed, I prepare the teeth and make you a set of provisionals — temporary veneers — to wear. And I think this stage is genuinely important: I like patients to live with their provisionals for several weeks, sometimes up to a month or even three months. You go home with them. Your family sees them. You trial the shape and even the colour in your real life, not just under the surgery lights. (The final porcelain will look better than the provisionals, but it gives you a real sense of things.)

Only once you’ve lived with it and you’re happy do we move to the final restorations. For the front teeth especially, I’ll often send you to the lab for a proper shade match so the colour is right. Then we fit the finished veneers.

Why I take it slowly

The reason I build in all that time isn’t caution for its own sake. It’s that I want you to have full control — or at least to genuinely feel you have full control — over your final teeth. This is your smile, and you’ll have it for years. I don’t want you fitting the veneers and then coming back unhappy, wanting changes, feeling something isn’t right. I’d much rather we discover that during the provisional stage, when everything is still adjustable, than after the porcelain is bonded on.

So I take it slowly, I keep you involved, and I let you live with the design before we commit. Obviously this applies to cases where there’s no urgency — no wedding next month, no hard deadline. Where there are only a couple of teeth involved, I treat it more like a single crown: still minimally invasive, still a minimal prep, but a quicker path. But for a full smile transformation, slow and collaborative is, in my view, the right way.

A note on what pairs well

Sometimes a veneer case benefits from a little groundwork first. If a patient has quite short teeth, for example, reshaping the gumline to expose more of the tooth — crown lengthening — can set up a much nicer result, and it pairs well with veneers. Depending on the case, that might be something we arrange as part of the plan. It’s another example of looking at the whole picture rather than just bonding porcelain onto teeth and hoping for the best.

The thread through all of it is the same: a beautiful result, achieved by removing as little of you as possible, at a pace that keeps you in control.

In the next piece, something a bit more technical but genuinely brilliant for patients — same-day crowns, and how our CEREC machine lets you walk out with a finished crown in a single visit.

Dr Reem Al-Kufaishi is a general dentist at BDS Dental with a special interest in minimally invasive cosmetic and restorative dentistry. To discuss veneers, contact the practice here. You can also book online here.