Shade guides are made and manufactured mainly in western countries or developed countries. There may be multidimensional spectrum of color of teeth round the globe. What are the means to develop customer-friendly shade guide which can include all hue of teeth round the globe ?
the difference may not be on the hue only as difference between different population along the globe,, but i think the difference is in the value of color and chroma, so these two guidelines may be affected by the vision itself or by lighting condition specially the natural light which may be changed during the day many thousand of type according to movement of sun and the wavelength of light fallen down this is the case in equatorial area, but in case of western specially far north where there is no natural light for the half of the year so they use only one light and they adopt to it and even dentist eye adapt to it so the selection will be easy and the error may be little,,,,,, i hope you can understand what i meant
Why not measure the shade of a tooth digitally? Tools and equipment for this is readily available.
Dear Bishal, nothing to worry about, as all of the conventional shade game comes under the great munsell system when ever we are dealing with shade matching in a clinical setup, abiding by the rules of conventional shade matching and ensuring a viable communication with your laboratory almost serve the purpose for about 90%. As far as the digital gadgets are concerned i agree with their practicability and reliability in almost all the situation; but you have to decide according to your depth of pocket as they approximately fall in between 3000 to 8000 $ if you are going for a patent brand. In my opinion " we do not have to reinvent the wheel" just take vita 3D master and also make sure to share it with your ceramist. Hope that i have answered your query. Regards
About 45 years ago as I was starting out in dental school, a prosthodontist told me to always match the color of the teeth to the skin of the individual. As I evolved as a clinician and then a clinical researcher, I looked back on those words to realized that the teeth come from a primordial cell, the same that lays down the skin, and as such the color of the teeth do match the shade and coloring of the skin of the individual. According to the geographical nature of the skin, God gave us a builtin sun protection device called melanin. So looking at the Vita guide and the extended Vita guide, it becomes obvious that the persons ethnic background determines the proper shade, so I developed a geographical shade format to follow, those people closest to the equator, having more melanin in their skin, a yellow/brown pigment get a yellow/brown Vita shade or A shade. going north or south of the tropic of Cancer or Capricorn, get a gray/brown shade, or C shade. Then looking at the longitudinal characteristics, people east of a line from the Ural mountains down through the middle east just east of the Mediterranean Sea, you simply add a red shade to the principal shade, or A shade becomes B shade and C shade becomes D shades. Therefore, European extraction individuals have C shades, Africans have A shades, Chinese/Japanese and others above the tropic line has D shades and those between the tropic lines have B shades. Hispanics have generally C shades from the European Hispanic/French backgrounds from invading groups mixed with native Indian populations that are D shades (red-gray-brown from migrations of populations across the Archipelago islands years past. Watch out for invading groups and penal colonies evidenced by Australia (predominately C shade), Brazil predominately C shade because of Portuguese settlement and South Africa predominately C shade because of Dutch settlement. Always factor in the amount of indigenous population that may be in the ancestral history of the patient if the original shade does not match. You will be about 95-98% correct if you just apply the basic rules and realized teeth generally darken with age as enamel is lost over time. I know in this politically correct society that I have been profiling people but its better than making everything wrong by using A2 (the most popular shade to labs) and B1 the second most popular shade for "whiter teeth. Ever wonder why you can pick out people especially those with single tooth anterior restorations? The answer lies in the fact that the color of their teeth, shade, chroma, hue didn't match that of the surrounding skin color. So much for fancy gadgets that cost a lot and often give you A2...
In my practice, we have used Easyshade (Vita) for ten years or so. Since its presentation we have switched to the Vita Master scale, abandoning the older guide. Considering our measurements I couldn't possibly find a correlation between ethnicity and tooth colour.
Oh, and BTW, as far as I am concerned, my own shade matching always was biased. Once we switched to digital shade measurements we started using tooth shades for restorations we would not have dared to use before. And the gadget never gets it wrong :-)
I'm not so sure that if my answer will be close the thing that you want to learn but I will tell something different in my way. Shade matching is one of the most important part of esthetic dentistry. There are too many different restorative materials produced and marketed by different laboratories and companies. I think main problem is there is still no standart between the shade guides and the products. But this is so normal. The restorative materials are containing different organic and inorganic matrixes and the materials are being developed day by day. The main purpose that I'm writing this is that you should not adhere totally to the shade guides of these products. First decide which type of composites or any other materials you will use for your patients and learn its properties and technical way too well. Then if you are using composites make your own shade guide. Create some tooth forms or some layers with different thicknesses and polymerize them and use these to decide which shade you will use for your patient. When you start to be an expert you will automatically start to generalize the shades and you will decide which shades of that product will be more useful for your clinic. So different products mean different shades and nowadays there are too many options of colours. Good luck for shade matching and have a nice day.