The Step Between the Before and the After

Search for veneers and you get two photographs. Crooked or discolored teeth, then a straight white smile.

There is a step between those two photographs, and somebody in a thread noticed that nobody wanted to show it:

You asked them, if they would send pictures of how it looks after shaving and they sent pictures about the finished treatment. That is worrying imo r/askdentists

That middle photograph is the one that decides everything.

What actually happens to the tooth

A veneer is a thin shell bonded to the front of a tooth. For it to sit flush rather than stick out, material has to come off the tooth first.

In order to put on the veneers they have to shave the enamel down on your teeth. r/askdentists

And that enamel is not coming back. It has no living cells in it — the cells that built it died as the tooth came through, and the body never makes more. So the moment the drill touches a healthy tooth, that tooth has permanently changed.

Which means the real decision isn’t do I want whiter, straighter teeth. It’s am I willing for these teeth to need a covering for the rest of my life. After preparation, a tooth without a veneer is a tooth with its outer layer partly gone.

The person who worked this out mid-consultation is the one who put it best:

After realizing that I would have to shave down several healthy teeth in order to get them, I’m heavily leaning against them. But I wanted to hear from the professionals. r/askdentists

Several healthy teeth. That’s the sentence. Not damaged ones — healthy ones.

How much varies enormously

This is where the honest answer refuses to be simple:

How much teeth need to be “shaved” varies case by case. You might need some orthodontics to make it minimal. The picture here does not look very minimal and too white but thats just my opinion. r/askdentists

Some cases genuinely need very little. Some need a great deal, particularly when veneers are being used to fake alignment — because a tooth that sits too far forward has to lose more material for a flat shell to line up with its neighbors.

Which produces the most useful piece of advice in the whole subject, and it comes from a dentist:

Ortho is always the first step! Hopefully once your bite is correct then you can discuss esthetics like veneers or enameloplasty (shaving your natural tooth down) r/askdentists

Move the teeth first, then decide if you still want to reshape them. Orthodontics takes nothing off. It’s slower and less dramatic and it’s the reason many people who arrive wanting veneers end up not needing them.

The maintenance nobody mentions

The other thing the two photographs don’t show is what the tooth needs afterwards. The same person who explained the shaving continued:

This said if you are not diligent getting seen by the dentist (I was not), little pieces of food and bacteria can get in between the veneers and your r/askdentists

That’s the failure mode. A veneer has an edge, and that edge is a join between ceramic and tooth. Decay at that margin is the common way veneers end badly — not the ceramic breaking, but the tooth underneath it going quietly while covered.

So the routine gets more demanding after veneers, not less. That’s the opposite of how the procedure is usually imagined.

And when it goes wrong it stays wrong

I have had surgical work that resulted in permanent changes to my body that I regret, I know the feeling. Veneers are great until they are not. Work for those that need them. I am sorry. r/askdentists

That comment is worth reading twice, because of what it isn’t. It isn’t anti-veneer. Work for those that need them — that’s a fair position, and plenty of people are genuinely glad they had it done.

The point is narrower and harder: this is a decision with no reverse gear, being made largely on the basis of two photographs that omit the step in between.

Three questions worth asking before agreeing

How much enamel comes off mine, specifically? Not in general — on these teeth. There should be a number or a description, and a dentist who won’t give one is telling you something.

Can I see the prepared-tooth stage? Not somebody’s finished result. The middle photograph.

What would orthodontics alone achieve here? If the answer is most of it, that changes the decision entirely.

The short version

Enamel doesn’t grow back, and veneers are fitted by removing some.

The before-and-after is two pictures. The decision lives in the one they don’t show you.