Dental Tooth Shade Guide

Identifying and communicating the shades of a patient’s teeth is a part of providing restorative dental care. Matching the restoration to the surrounding dentition is important so the prosthetic or filling will provide a natural appearance. The use of a dental tooth shade guide system can make this process easier. Most shade guides feature tabs representing the different shades in a standardized dental shade system, and the tabs are simply held up to the patient’s teeth to find the correct match. When communicating shade to a dental laboratory it can help to take a picture of the shade tab you’ve selected next to the tooth. The shade tabs can also be used to communicate with patients about stains on their teeth when proposing dental whitening treatments.