The mock-up is the only stage where changes are free and reversible — so check it standing, in daylight, and while you are talking rather than posing.
It is the planned design transferred into your mouth in tooth-coloured resin over your unprepared teeth, usually on the first or second day of your visit. Nothing is drilled and nothing is cemented; it lifts off afterwards. This is deliberately the cheapest possible moment to disagree with us, because changing a line on a mock-up costs a laboratory afternoon, while changing it after twenty units have been milled costs a remake and another trip.
Say a long series of words with F and V sounds. The biting edges of the upper front teeth should touch the inner edge of the lower lip lightly. If they push into it, the teeth are too long. Then repeat sentences full of S sounds: whistling or a lisp means the palatal contour or the length is wrong. Both are corrected in resin in minutes, and neither can be corrected after cementation without remaking the case.
With your lips relaxed a natural amount of upper incisor shows, and less of it as you get older. A design that shows nothing at rest reads as an ageing smile; one that shows a great deal reads as artificial. Then walk to a window. Clinic lighting is bright, cool and unforgiving, and it flatters bright shades, whereas daylight is where you will actually be seen. Photograph it on your own phone, with and without flash, and look again the next morning.
We ask patients to keep the mock-up on, eat a normal meal, sleep on it and come back with a list. The most useful sentences a patient can say are the blunt ones: too long, too square, too bright, too even. Anything on that list can be changed at no cost at this stage. The final units are then milled and cemented within the same five to seven day visit, at 180 EUR per tooth in monolithic zirconium.
Yes, and we encourage it. Take the photographs outdoors in daylight, from three angles: straight on, three-quarter and profile. A design that only works from one angle is a design that has not been finished.
That is why the final units are tried in with water before they are cemented, so shade and shape can still be corrected. Once cemented, a change means a remake, so we would rather spend an extra hour at the try-in than send you home with something you merely tolerate.