GET THE MOST OUT OF IPS EMPRESS!

Valuable tips you can share with your dentists on how they can optimize their Empress experience and create more beautiful, flawless restorations!

• Good preparations are essential. Adequately reduce the tooth, providing rounded
  shoulders and no sharp line angles. Use a fine diamond bur along the margins
  to insure smooth finish lines.
  
  
• Before final impressions, verify that preparations are smooth.
  Make sure to avoid sharp internal line angles.
  
  
• Use a buffalo mirror to verify arch form reduction;
  one prep can be your limiting factor.
  
  
• Try to make all preparation shades a uniform color.
  
  
• Handling Empress veneers and inlays with adhesive holders like Vivasticks®
  greatly facilitates handling during cementation.
  
  
• When cementing Empress veneers, apply pressure incisally and gingivally
  while the assistant tacks the center of the veneer with a 2 mm diameter curing tip.
  Expose to the overhead light then clean and floss before final curing.
  
  
• When color is being improved (brightened) with veneers, the amount of reduction
  required is directly proportional to the amount of shade change desired. Small color
  shifts may be made with conservative preparation. More aggressive color changes
  require more aggressive preparation.
     
• Severe discoloration should be handled with direct bonding to the prepared tooth.
  Always make sure the incisal of the prepared tooth is not too close to the surface
  of the restoration where it causes a chromatic headlight or a horizontal line of
  translucency demarcation.
  
  
• Always do a try in and observe the restorations in varying light sources.
  
  
• For marketing, great close ups allow the patient to really appreciate
  the beauty of the restoration.
  
  
• Perfect your provisionals.
  
  
• If you are restoring 6 or 8 maxillary teeth instead of a full arch or full mouth, ask the lab to make a "custom shade tab" when they fabricate the 6 or 8 veneers. It is a little chip of porcelain that exactly matches the veneers. Store it in the patient's record and then if they decide at a later date to do 2 or 4 more veneers to widen the buccal corridor, you already have the shade matched exactly. Otherwise, adding a few veneers to an existing case can be trial and error to get the exact value and shade used previously. This makes it easy.
  
  
• Natural esthetics within the smile will occur with proper incisal characteristics expertly placed by your ceramists. Use of blues, ambers, hypo-calcifications, halos,
  clears, and randomness can all add to the beauty of a smile.
  
  
• Use magnification when preparing, temporizing, and seating Empress restorations.
  If you can't see it you can't treat it. To provide the best for your patients you must
  be able to properly visualize.
  
  
• Insist that your lab use Empress products throughout the fabrication of the restoration.
  Non-certified materials can compromise the long term results of the restoration.
  
  
• Provide complete shading information including a custom shade tab and a photograph
  of the shade tab next to the treated area. Supply the preparation shade to the lab.
  
  
• Adjust the occlusion after cementation. Use high speed finishing diamond followed
  by slow speed porcelain polishers to leave a smooth surface.
  
  
• Use Variolink Veneer cement to bond Empress laminates. The unique value-ordered
  try-in pastes simplifies shade matching.
  
  
• Desensitizing the tooth following preparation mimimizes patient discomfort
  especially if the temporary would inadvertently come loose.
  
  
• Lab communication is crucial. A lab can use the Empress System to give you
  the life-like restorations you want, but communicating the final shape, color and characterization is a must. Your patients don't see the preparations, but they do
  see the final restorative results.