Treating dental flaws like tooth stains or chipped teeth can seem simple enough. A whitening session or well-placed crown is often enough to help, making your grin look as good as new. That said, how do you fix your smile when you have a gap between two front teeth? Your Richardson dentists are here with the correct answers and will gladly share them. So, just keep reading to learn about diastemas, what causes them, and their cosmetic dental fixes.
How Do Front Tooth Gaps Happen?
When you have a front tooth gap, you’re dealing with a diastema. This term describes a space wider than .5 millimeters between any of your teeth. While harmless (it shouldn’t affect your oral health), a diastema can throw off your smile’s good looks.
Diastemas can have various causes for both kids and adults. These include:
- Undersized Teeth –Diastemas will often form when one tooth is smaller than an adjacent one. In fact, they’re even more likely when the tinier tooth is an upper lateral incisor.
- Poor Oral Habits –Bab habits like thumb sucking, lip sucking, and tongue thrusting can cause diastemas. By putting pressure on your front teeth, they may create a sizable tooth gap.
- A Too-Large Jaw – If your jaw is very large relative to your teeth, tooth gaps can form.
- Infected Gums –Often enough, gum disease erodes the bone that supports your teeth. This process can loosen your pearly whites and spread them apart.
What Can Dentistry Do to Fix Them?
While diastemas don’t look great, cosmetic dental work can close them. The treatments best suited for fixing tooth gaps are:
Direct Bonding
Direct bonding hides minor smile flaws with tooth-colored resin, so it’s often used to treat small stains, cracks, etc. However, this procedure can just as easily fix a gap between your front teeth. A dentist would just need to apply its resin to the unwanted smile space. Once that material hardens, you won’t see a diastema in your grin anymore.
Porcelain Veneers
Once placed on the fronts of teeth, veneers can hide many smile flaws – tooth stains, chips, etc. Diastemas are one such fault, as treatment would cover up the gap between your teeth. Friends and family will only see a well-aligned smile when the veneers are securely set.
Invisalign
Invisalign can treat many orthodontic issues, diastemas being among them. All a patient would need to do is wear aligners over the area with the smile gap. After enough time passes, the trays will have closed the unwanted space by moving the gapped teeth closer together.
A gap between two front teeth isn’t an unsolvable problem. To address it, just see your local dental provider for help!
About the Practice
Canyon Creek Family Dentistry is based in Richardson, TX. Led by Drs. Asmoodeh, Gadusu, and Ahn, our practice offers warm and affordable dental care for all. Patients can trust that we only provide treatments your smile needs, saving you hours and dollars in the dentist’s chair. That means our preventive, cosmetic, and restorative services will only ever help your grin! For more details or to book a visit, please contact us on our website or by phone at (972)-644-3800.