Dental Bonding: Stories

In an unfortunate turn of events, some drunken reveler accidentally knocked a champagne bottle into my teeth on New Year's Eve 2004. My upper right front "I" tooth chipped on the corner, which I didn't realize until I felt like I had sand in my mouth and finally ran my tongue against the rough, jagged edge of my tooth.

Obviously, the damage was just cosmetic, and I thankfully wasn't in any pain, but my tooth looked pretty snarly, so I opted to have my dentist fill in the corner that chipped with a dental bonding procedure a few days later.

It took about an hour to an hour and a half for the whole thing.  My dentist didn't really explain the steps to me beforehand, so I wasn't really sure what to except.  He ended up applying the resin, shaping it for awhile, then he put a bright purple (I'm guessing UV) light on it.  He took a strip of like a very fine sand paper and buffed up the tooth.

A few days after I had the bonding done, I was carefully inspecting my partially new tooth with my tongue and felt a weird divot on it, which after further inspection, I discovered was actually a visible flaw on the bonded area.  It drove me crazy that the surface of my tooth wasn't smooth, so I went back a few weeks later and had my dentist try again.  He was kind of a jerk about it and told me after finishing a second time that, "That's the best I can do at this point.  You'll just have to live with it."

Well, I'm still not happy because the "fixed" bonding job resulted in my bonded tooth being pratically on top of another tooth (I can't even get floss in between them), and the tooth doesn't match my other teeth at all (it's gray).  I'm sure it's not all that noticeable to others, but I definitely notice it.  I've looked into getting it bonded again by someone who knows what they're doing (my original dentist was not a cosmetic dentist but a general practitioner), but I'm thinking about veneers instead of spending another $400 on a bond job that I fear is never going to look natural.

But hey, at least it looks like I have a whole tooth instead of two-thirds of my tooth.