Mastering High-End Esthetics with LayZir

I’ve been a dental technician for nearly my entire life, having grown up working alongside my father in his lab. A few years ago, he joined me at a prosthodontic practice in Idaho, where I now manage the day-to-day operations of the in-house lab.

Our lab work centers around some of the most high-end, detail-oriented cases in the field. Dentists often turn to us for complex patients and challenging cases that fall outside the scope of their own expertise. Because of this, much of our work is implant-based or highly esthetic—for example, All-on-X restorations and shade-matching anteriors.

About 80% of what we produce is zirconia, and our material of choice is LayZir.

The Zirconia We’ve Been Waiting For

We’ve been on the lookout for years to find a material that has the characteristics we are all trying to achieve—a very high strength, good inherent translucency, and an amount of brightness/value that is accurate to the shade tab. I was introduced to LayZir at the Symposium on Ceramics in San Diego a few years ago, and when I started to work with it, I was super impressed. It has the right amount of chroma—not too much, not too little—and it has the right value. It has a really nice value in the cervical portion and a very lifelike translucency to it with no visible seam or line of transition between layers.

Typically, zirconia materials will offer several of these features, but LayZir has the whole package, plus a strength rating of 1,450 MPa in the cervical, which is beyond what the other manufacturers offer. We’ve been super happy with it and have done over 100 full arches since we started using it.

Lifelike & Beautiful—All on its Own

In terms of working with LayZir, the processing is straightforward. Even on full-mouth rehabilitations where every crown is restored individually with LayZir, we often do it monolithic without having to layer anything on top of it. We don’t have to guess at the color using infiltration techniques, because it’s already there. Once it comes out of the sinter, we’re able to move forward to a glaze, and it comes out really lifelike and beautiful all by itself.

Zirconia has become a heavily saturated market, and there are plenty of options out there for both dentists and labs. You can definitely find a more affordable zirconia material, but for what we’re trying to accomplish, the extra money we pay for LayZir is more than worth it for the consistency of the shades and the beautiful final result.

Case In Point: LayZir Creates an All-Around Great Result

This patient, a man in his mid-40’s, presented with severe wear and attrition from dietary and parafunctional habits and was looking for a solution. In this case, the solution was a full-mouth rehabilitation to restore his vertical dimension and rejuvenate his smile, which lacked adequate tooth display.

Dr. Michael Lynn Gurney’s treatment plan consisted of preparing all the teeth, opening the patient’s vertical dimension, and restoring each tooth to its proper length and occlusal function. Once the patient consented to treatment, the teeth were prepared. A bite was recorded at the new open vertical, and digital impressions were taken using an intraoral scanner.

While the doctor was obtaining traditional PVS impressions, the clinic staff sent the digital scans to our lab where I immediately designed a full set of custom temporaries with exocad in just 1 hour. My team milled and polished the custom temporaries and delivered them to the clinic. Dr. Gurney seated the temps and sent the patient home.

Using desktop-scanned stone models from the doctor’s PVS impressions, I created a new and more meticulous design in exocad for the final crowns. Once the LayZir crowns were milled, all of the final morphology and surface texture was hand-worked in the greenstate with diamond burs and polishing wheels, including a pre-polish to make post-sinter polishing much quicker and easier.

We decided that monolithic restorations would be best in this case due to the patient’s history of bruxism, so the occlusal and lingual surfaces of the LayZir were polished to a high luster, and the labial surfaces were sandblasted to receive a single coat of glaze. The wet glaze was infused with liquid ceramics and fired at just the right temperature to achieve a natural, enamel like surface luster. Everyone involved with this case was very satisfied with the result, including the patient, who now has a positive outlook on his oral health.