Last updated: September 2026
Most people arrive at a cosmetic consultation with a photograph on their phone and a sentence that starts with "I do not like". The sentence is usually accurate about the feeling and vague about the cause, which is fine, because working out the cause is the dentist part of the job.
What helps enormously is knowing that there are only three things wrong with any tooth you are unhappy with. The colour, the shape, or the position. Sometimes two of them, occasionally all three. They are separate problems, they have separate treatments, they cost different amounts, and the order you do them in changes the final bill.
Get those three sorted in your head before the appointment and the rest of the conversation becomes much easier.
Look at the tooth or teeth that bother you and ask, in this order:
People conflate these constantly, and understandably. A tooth that sits slightly behind the arch catches less light and reads as darker, so it gets described as a colour problem when it is a position problem. A tooth worn short at the edge looks older, and old reads as yellow. The eye reports a general impression. The treatment has to address the actual mechanism.
Professional whitening lifts staining held within the enamel. Tea, coffee, red wine, tobacco and time all deposit colour into the tooth surface over years, and whitening gel works on exactly that. On natural teeth stained that way it is the most direct treatment there is, and it removes nothing from the tooth.
What it does not reach:
That first point causes more disappointment than the rest combined. If you have an old white filling in a front tooth and you whiten around it, the filling does not follow. It becomes the darkest thing in your mouth, which is the opposite of the intention. The fix is not complicated, it is just an order-of-operations problem: whiten first, let the shade settle, then replace the filling to match where the teeth ended up. Our teeth whitening page covers the treatment itself, our page on tooth-coloured fillings covers the replacement, and the article on what actually stains teeth goes further into where the colour comes from.
Shape problems are the widest category and the one where the choice of treatment matters most, because the treatments differ in how much tooth they consume.
The honest way to think about this is that you are trading tooth structure for control. Bonding takes almost nothing and gives you less control. A crown gives the most control and takes the most tooth. Neither is better in the abstract. What matters is how much tooth is left to work with, which is a question only an examination answers.
Worn front edges are worth singling out, because they are common and they are often mistaken for a colour complaint. Teeth flattened by years of grinding lose their translucent edge, the length becomes uneven, and the whole set reads older. Rebuilding those edges is a shape treatment, covered on our page about building up worn teeth. Doing it without addressing the grinding tends to end the way the enamel did.
Crowding, rotation, spacing and teeth that stand forward of the arch are position problems, and there is a genuine fork in the road here.
You can move the teeth. Clear aligners use removable trays and suit people who would rather not wear a fixed appliance. Traditional braces remain the most predictable option where the movements are complex. Cosmetic braces concentrate on the teeth that show when you smile and generally run over a shorter period than full orthodontic treatment. All of these take months, and none of them remove tooth structure.
Or you can disguise the position with a shape treatment, which is what people are describing when they ask whether veneers can be used "instead of braces". Sometimes they can. The catch is that hiding a tooth that sits out of line means preparing more of it, permanently, than a smaller correction would have required. Mild cases work well. As the position problem gets larger, the amount of tooth being removed to fake the alignment grows, and at some point that becomes a poor trade.
This is a decision worth taking slowly, because moving teeth is reversible in a way that removing them is not. Our comparison of orthodontic options sets out what each appliance does, and the crooked teeth page covers the underlying condition.
Most people have a combination, and this is where planning earns its place. The order below is not arbitrary. Each step changes the information the next step needs.
The expensive version of this mistake is straightforward to describe. Someone has two front crowns made, is pleased with them, and decides a year later to whiten. The natural teeth lift. The crowns do not. The only way to bring them back into line is to remake the crowns, and remaking a crown that was perfectly good is a cost nobody planned for. Had the whitening happened first, the crowns would have been made at the final shade for the same original fee.
Records come first, and we take them with an intraoral scanner rather than impression material. A small handheld wand builds a three-dimensional model of your teeth in a few minutes, with no tray, no putty and nothing to gag on. Practically, it also gives us a file we keep, so a scan taken now can be compared with one taken later to see whether wear is progressing. Detail is on our intraoral scanner page.
Where the plan involves the underlying bone, an implant site or a difficult root, we have cone beam CT on site, so the imaging happens in the building rather than as a separate trip to a radiology clinic on another day.
Shade is chosen with you rather than for you. It is worth doing in daylight where possible, because the light in a treatment room and the light on Wicklow Avenue when you walk back out to the car are not the same light, and a shade that reads well under one can read differently under the other. If you want work that nobody comments on, say so at this stage. It changes the shade and sometimes the material, and it is a much easier conversation before treatment than after.
For crowns, our scan-and-mill equipment is in the building, so for suitable cases the crown is designed and milled here and fitted at the same appointment. No temporary crown, no second visit, no two-week wait wearing something that does not match. More on the same-day crowns page.
The enquiries are seasonal in a way that is fairly easy to explain. Whitening questions climb through late winter and spring, which is formal and graduation season across Luther College, Aquinas College, Tintern Grammar, Billanook College and Ringwood Secondary, and again ahead of the wedding months. If a date is driving your timeline, bring the date to the first appointment. A whitening course, a settling period and then matched restorative work is a sequence with a length to it, and there is no way to compress the settling period without compromising the match.
Access shapes the plan more than people expect when treatment runs across several appointments. There is parking on site at Wicklow Avenue, which matters on the days the Main Street shopping strip is busy. If you are coming by train, Croydon Station is on the Lilydale line, two stops out from Ringwood via Ringwood East. Coming from Heathmont or Bayswater means the Belgrave line and a change at Ringwood, which is worth knowing before you book a run of appointments rather than after. We are open until 6:00pm on weekdays and all day Saturday until 5:00pm, which is usually the deciding factor for anyone who cannot take weekday time off for a course of treatment.
The ten dentists here means you can usually be seen by the same dentist through a staged plan, which matters for cosmetic work more than for a filling. Shade judgement and the sense of what you asked for are not fully transferable between people, however good the notes are.
Some plain statements, because a page about cosmetic treatment is exactly where they belong.
Results vary between people, and the reasons are physical. How thick your enamel is, what shade you are starting from, how much tooth structure remains, how your teeth meet when you bite, and whether you grind at night all affect what is achievable and how long it lasts. A dentist can tell you what is realistic for your teeth after looking at them, and that answer is worth more than any general claim on any website, including this one.
Whitening has a ceiling, and it is set by your own tooth structure rather than by the product. Bonding stains and chips over time and is a maintenance material by design. Veneers and crowns are restorations, and restorations have a service life. None of this is an argument against treatment. It is an argument for going in with an accurate picture, which is also the best protection against being sold something larger than the problem.
And cosmetic treatment sits on top of dental health, never instead of it. If a check-up finds decay or gum disease, that is the first appointment, not a delay tactic. Our check-ups and cleans page covers what that examination involves.
We do not publish figures for cosmetic work, and the reason is not evasiveness. The same complaint produces very different treatment plans depending on which of the three problems is driving it and how many teeth are involved. Whitening one arch and rebuilding eight worn front edges are not neighbours on a price list.
What is fixed is the process. After an examination you receive a written plan, itemised by stage, with the expected health fund rebate shown, before anything is booked. You can take it home and think about it, and no part of it commits you to the rest.
On rebates, the dividing line is purpose rather than name. Work with a restorative function, a crown or a tooth-coloured filling for instance, commonly attracts a benefit under extras cover. Treatment chosen purely for appearance usually does not, whatever your level of cover. We are a preferred provider at the top tier with each major fund and claim through HICAPS at the practice; our private health insurance page lists the funds.
Come with the three questions answered as best you can. Colour, shape, position. Even a rough answer narrows the appointment considerably, and if you are wrong about which one it is, that is useful information too.
Call (03) 9725 8040 or book online. We are at 59 Wicklow Avenue, Croydon, with parking on site and Saturday appointments available. The full range is set out on our cosmetic dentistry page, and if your concern is mostly about the front teeth, the comparison of veneers, bonding and whitening covers those three side by side.
This article is general information, not personal dental advice. Suitability for any treatment described here depends on an examination of your own teeth and gums. Health fund benefits vary by policy and are set by your fund.