Technique Tips: How to Make a Customized Shade Guide

Contemporary composite materials must have advanced colour matching properties to satisfy patient and professional demand for high-quality aesthetic restorations.

Precise colour matching remains one of the most challenging tasks in clinical dentistry, due partly to the widely acknowledged limitations of proprietary shade guides:^1,2

While colour matching for direct composite restorations may be optimized by studying light cured material samples placed on teeth, this is of limited benefit when using polychromatic layering techniques. Here the final colour of a restoration is derived from a combination of opaque ‘dentine’ and overlying translucent ‘enamel’ shades.

To overcome this problem an innovative silicone template and associated components (My Shade Guide, Smileline™, Switzerland) has been developed (Figure 1) and may be used according to published guidelines² to create personalized shade tabs with standardized dimensions of the ‘enamel’ and ‘dentine’ layers. Step-by-step practical tips for the construction of a customized shade guide follow (Figure 2 to Figure 18):