Solution to a single discolored front tooth

I am 25 and I have one discolored tooth on the front. I had root canal done when I was about 12. I am trying to decide what I should do about it. I have talked to a lot of dentists also read many articles online but everybody seems to have a different opinion about the best way to fix it. One dentist said that crowns or veneers are too invasive and he would not do it if he was in my position. He said that I should do internal bleaching. However, I heard that this makes teeth very brittle. Another one said that I should do a crown but I somebody else said that this requires a lot of shaving of a tooth. I know that veneers require much less work but I was told that it is going to be very hard to match one tooth to the rest. What would you do? I would be willing to even go with putting veneers for few more of my teeth to have them all matched. But really would you do it to yourself or your children by knowing what it encounters???

Thank you very much,
Anna

Anna,
Well, the first thing you need to know is that your case is cosmetic. So you need to cross off about 98% of the dentists you might consider for asking this question. Dentists usually go to dental school because they like to fix things. They’re engineers at heart, and simply don’t have much passion for appearance-related dentistry. Unfortunately.

So to this one dentist, just bleaching the tooth internally will look “good enough.” To another, it is simply too hard to match a single tooth, especially if you have a dark tooth to start with.

There are several good ways to treat this, but the key is going to be to find a truly artistic cosmetic dentist who won’t be satisfied until this one tooth is fixed so that it perfectly matches its companion front tooth. And the dentist, of course, has to have enough knowledge of color and the ability to communicate color with a lab technician, so that it gets done.

Here’s one possibility that I might do, depending on what your tooth looks like and anything else that might be wrong with it. I could start by doing the internal bleaching, and getting this tooth as close as we could to its companion (This will not make it brittle). Then, rather than shave away a lot of the tooth with a crown, I would shave away just half a millimeter and then do either direct dental bonding or a single porcelain veneer. And I would match the tooth next to it perfectly.

The direct bonding is a nice way to do it, because the dentist, if they’re an artist, will be able to match the color right on the spot. The veneer is a little more work, but it can also be matched perfectly if you’re willing to take a few trips back and forth to the dentist to get it tried on until the color and translucency can be matched.