Diagnostic Wax Up and Mock Up in Comprehensive Esthetic Treatment

Introduction

The smile can assess and reflect one’s personality, a great smile can help some people to build confident during talking, smiling or even laughing in public. In order to have successful result you should have a good communication with the laboratory and the patient. One way to communicate with the patient and the laboratory is by providing the patient with solid material that he/she can feel, try and see the expected outcome of the treatment and the dentist to evaluate and assess the position, mid line, phonetics and esthetic etc. ALL of that can be done by doing a wax up and mock up.

Nowadays digital tools facilitate planning of the procedure which allows you to virtually assess, draw the smile and communicate with your lab technician and it has many advantages over direct contact with the technician without the medium which is the digital tool like evaluation of the patient teeth, and it supported gingiva, smile and face analysis through drawing lines.

Wax up

Listening carefully to the patient expectation and his concerns can help you planning the smile designed and to transfer the information to the ceramist in order to facilitate waxing the teeth up. What is wax up? It is” the action of applying wax to the model in order to do procedural simulation and assessment of the final result”. Why to do diagnostic wax up? Basically, to visualize and assess the result before doing any Permanente preparation to the natural tooth.

1. Should be very close from teeth natural color so, the patient can understand it easily as well as dentist assessment.
2. Should resample the anatomy and projection of the patient teeth.
3. Correction of the midline, occlusion or even length to width ratio.

If the clinical crown is small, we can add wax either cervically or in the incisal edge in order to correct the crown length depend on the case if the clinician decided to do it cervically that mean we should do surgical crown lengthening or gingivectomy depend on the case.

It is basically a trial smile allowing the clinician and the patient to visualize the final result in the patient mouth without preparing the tooth and it serves as a guide in restorative treatment and it has another name BFEP “bonded functional esthetic prototype”. Materials and techniques to fabricate mock ups:

1. We can use flowable composite resin material.
2. Protemp TM with specific shade.
3. Acrylic resin materials.
4. CAD CAM mock upflowable composite consider as the most beautiful way in doing mock up because of its ability to flow which lead to details capturing of the wax up and light reflection as well as its translucency.

In order to do flowable composite as mockup we need to duplicate the wax up in order to do vacuumed tray which we going to use later on during curing the composite.

Nowadays Potemp comes with different shades it’s advantage over the flowable composite its ability to set without light cure so, we can do mock up without duplicating and pouring another cast we can use simply a silicon putty index.

Powder and liquid acrylic resin the only advantage it has over both the flowable composite and the Protemp TM it is not expensive it has the disadvantage of having only one shade and difficult to control and needs experience.

CAD CAM mock up it’s the latest technology in the world of esthetic dentistry it has the ability to print the trays designing the smile it has many advantages very fast no need to pour the cast no need of manual technician waxes up everything precisely done in the program, expensiveness and cost the main disadvantage.

Conclusion

To conclude good communication with both the patient and the laboratory technician leads to successful treatment giving the patient the chance to give his opinion without any pressure, helping the technician by dong digital smile designed and using mock up to view the final outcome without even doing preparation to the tooth surface giving both clinician and patient to like modified or dislike the outcome all of this makes our service and treatment successful and leads to a beautiful outcome.