When your dentist informs you that you will need a crown, you probably worry about what kind of crown the dentist will use. After all, there are tooth-colored crowns and metal crowns. There are pros and cons to each.
Metal Crowns
Pros
Metal dental crowns are very strong and very durable. They will last a very long time when you are taking good care of your teeth in general. They also resist grinding and bruxism, which can damage some other types of crowns fairly quickly.
Cons
Unless you really like a lot of shiny metal in your mouth, you might be a bit embarrassed to flash your smile with metal crowns. With the exception of solid gold crowns, you may find these rather unattractive, a drawback for anyone that does not want other people to have a negative impression of them and how the person with the metal crown pays attention to their teeth. Additionally, your living tooth under the metal crown can still decay, and removing a metal crown to treat the decay or perform a root canal is extremely difficult.
Tooth-Colored Crowns
Pros
Nobody can tell that you have a crown. It looks like a completely natural tooth, right on down to the pointy surfaces on the top and sides of the crown. If your insurance covers it, or if you can afford it, the porcelain crowns are the hardest and most durable of the crowns. These are the best crowns to have if you tend to grind your teeth in your sleep but you do not want a metal crown. Your dentist can even match the exact color of the crown to the color of your neighboring teeth so that nobody can tell that your crown is a crown at all.
Cons
The pure resin crowns that contain nothing else but resin are tooth-colored, but they will need to be replaced every decade or so. The resin-only crowns tend to not hold up under the grinding pressure of bruxism, which is why most dentists recommend a resin-porcelain composite, straight porcelain, or porcelain-zirconium composite for a crown. Depending on what your insurance will cover and what you are willing to pay, you may be able to choose from more than one of these options. An additional con is that if your natural teeth become more discolored, or you whiten them to a color lighter than the crown, then the crown in its permanent coloration becomes obvious.
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