Excellent restorations come from a combination of multiple well orchestrated factors. This includes your technique and – you guessed it – materials. Your choices in the latter arena are significant in the long run. One of the most common questions we encounter in working with clients at the lab is what bonding or cementing agents they should use for restorations.
The cementing or bonding agent you choose will definitely vary. Still, we’ve narrowed down the common combinations that lead to the most success. After asking our clients their general preferences, these are the materials we came up with:
Best Bonding and Cementing Agents for Restorations
For Empress, Authentic® and Ceramco 3, we advise total etch, relying on a 4th generation adhesive agent and Ivoclar’s Variolink Veneer. This will help you maximize your results with this particular set of materials.
Empress crowns that are over 2.0 mm thick have a different set of requirements and will therefore need cements unique to their particular properties. Our recommendation is 3M Relyx or any dual-cure cement with the 4th generation adhesive. That will set you up for a durable final outcome.
For Lava, you can feel free to go with multiple kinds of self-etching resin cement. A few that our clients have had good experiences with include Unicem, Multilink, BisCem, and MaxCem Elite.
Finally, there is e.Max Pressed. In this case, it’s best to choose 3M Relyx or an equivalent dual-cure cement with the 4th generation adhesive.
As you can see, there are many commonalities between these recommendations. Overall though, there is enough nuance to each different restoration that you do need to pay attention to the optimal bonding or cementing agent.
What bonding and cementing agents do you prefer for specific cases? We’d love to hear from you in the comments! And don’t miss this recent blog from Dr. Catalano on combining ortho and cosmetic treatments…