When you talk to dentists about the procedures they are fearful of, seating porcelain veneers comes up frequently as one of the most anxiety-producing. In this article, I want to highlight the technique I use for the seating process. 

seating porcelain veneers

I have been doing veneers for over 25 years. Back in 1986, when I first started doing veneers, I used to bond all the veneers at the same time, but my technique has evolved over time.

The patient I’m going to use as an example is pictured. Prior to the seating appointment, she had undergone two years of orthodontics to intrude the right canine, lateral and central which had significant wear and were over-erupted. I then prepped all six anterior teeth for veneers.

  1. Remove the temporary. If you spot bond the temporary in place, as I do, you will probably have to grind through the area that was bonded to allow for removal.
  2. Verify if area is clean. After removing the temporaries, it’s extremely important to make sure all of the cement has been removed and the dentin is clean. If there is any resin cement on the prep in the area of bonding, it can easily be removed by using a high-speed brownie or a KS0 burr. I follow this with air abrasion of the entire prep using aluminum oxide.
  3. Place veneers, check contacts. Once the area is clean, you can place the veneers on the preps and proceed to check the contacts and margins. At this stage, I simply try the veneers in dry. Once I know the veneers fit acceptably, I use water as a “try-in” paste to evaluate color. If the water try-in looks good, I’ll use translucent cement to seat the restorations. If the color is a problem I’ll start trying some of the colored try-in pastes to determine which cement I might use. In particular, the WO cement from the 3M veneer cement kit can be a life saver to brighten the restorations without making them appear too opaque. 

In Part II, I'll discuss steps 4 through 8 of properly seating veneers, beginning with materials.  


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