The creation of a beautiful smile often includes porcelain crowns rather than the prototypical porcelain veneer restoration.  Preexisting large fillings or crowns, a history of teeth grinding, challenging ‘bite’ problems and significant lengthening of teeth are some of the reasons why a crown would be preferred.

Crowns without a metal core inside offer the best esthetics because of the way they reflect light and the ability to manage the dark (blue) line that can be present at the gumline edge of a porcelain fused to metal crown.  The most popular Porcelain crowns are Empress crowns and the relatively new “Lava” crown. 

Lava crowns offer considerable strength over the typical all porcelain crown due to an inner core made from zirconium.  This core is ‘milled’ through a CAD/CAM process and is carried out at only a select few dental laboratories in Southern California.  Historically; porcelain crowns were significantly weaker than conventional PFM (porcelain fused to metal) crowns and cosmetic dentists were concerned about them breaking.  Also, if the underlying tooth was dark, the typical all porcelain crown might show this darkness through the crown, making it difficult to match adjacent teeth properly.  The strength and transparency issues are addressed with Lava crowns.  So far, the results are very promising! 

The Lava restoration can even be used for small bridges; giving dentists an opportunity to replace missing teeth without using any metal.

You can see some examples of Lava crowns on my website in the Porcelain crowns section of the gallery.