Downsview Dental Care Cosmetic Dentistry A Smile Worth Paying For | Page 4

What is Cosmetic Dentistry?
The simple answer to this question is that Cosmetic Dentistry is about improving the appearance
of a person’s smile through aesthetic improvements to their teeth or gums such as adjusting the
colour, position, alignment, shape or size of the teeth in order to improve a person’s smile.
Therefore Cosmetic Dentistry - as the name suggests - is about improvements to appearance and
less concerned with the functionality or overall health of the teeth. As such it can be viewed as
being a vanity service which is more art than science as the dental work undertaken has often little
health or medical value. Indeed Cosmetic Dentistry despite being in huge demand is not actually a
recognized world-wide specialty of the dentistry profession. This leads us on to the trickier
definition of Cosmetic Dentistry because despite not being recognized as a profession cosmetic
dentists must have some sort of highly specialized training. The answer to that riddle is that
cosmetic dentistry is actually skills built upon a professional specialty called restorative dentistry.
As a result cosmetic dentistry and restorative dentistry overlap, as both use the same general
techniques such as crowns and implants.