Dental porcelain

Dental porcelain (also known as dental ceramic) is a dental material used by dental technicians to create biocompatible lifelike dental restorations, such as crowns, bridges, and veneers. Evidence suggests they are an effective material as they are biocompatible, aesthetic, insoluble and have a hardness of 7 on the Mohs scale. For certain dental prostheses, such as three-unit molars porcelain fused to metal or in complete porcelain group, zirconia-based restorations are recommended.^[1]

The word "ceramic" is derived from the Greek word κέραμος keramos, meaning "potter's clay".^[2] It came from the ancient art of fabricating pottery where mostly clay was fired to form a hard, brittle object; a more modern definition is a material that contains metallic and non-metallic elements (usually oxygen). These materials can be defined by their inherent properties including their hard, stiff, and brittle nature due to the structure of their inter-atomic bonding, which is both ionic and covalent. In contrast, metals are non-brittle (display elastic behavior), and ductile (display plastic behaviour) due to the nature of their inter-atomic metallic bond. These bonds are defined by a cloud of shared electrons with the ability to move easily when energy is applied. Ceramics can vary in opacity from very translucent to very opaque. In general, the more glassy the microstructure (i.e. noncrystalline) the more translucent it will appear, and the more crystalline, the more opaque.^[3]