Our In House Dental Lab
Here’s something most patients never think to ask: where is my veneer, crown, or bridge actually being made? At the vast majority of dental offices, the answer is a commercial lab in another city, sometimes another country, where a technician who has never seen your face shapes your restoration from a few measurements and a shade code, then ships it back days or weeks later.
Our Toronto Dental Lab
At Toronto Smile Gallery, the answer is much simpler: right here, in our own in-house dental lab in Yorkville. We’re one of the few cosmetic practices with a true dental lab in Toronto under the same roof as the dentists. All of our custom porcelain veneers and porcelain restorations are fabricated on-site, with each tooth and each smile designed individually for you. It’s the quiet reason behind some of the most natural-looking results we create. As you’ll see below, the reason our veneer patients are spared one of the worst parts of the traditional process: temporaries.
What an In-House Lab Actually Means
When a practice outsources its lab work, there’s an unavoidable gap. The dentist sends off impressions, photos and notes, and a technician somewhere else interprets them as best they can. If the shade is slightly off or the shape isn’t quite right, the case travels back and forth by courier and you wait.
Having our own lab closes that gap entirely. Our dentists work alongside skilled dental technicians and ceramists in the same building, on the same cases, often in the same conversation. They can hold the porcelain up against your face, carry out custom shade matching against your skin tone and the teeth around it, and refine the colour, contour and character in real time. Not from a written description, but from looking at you. Eliminating that communication breakdown is exactly why in-house work tends to look so much more natural.
Why It Matters for Your Smile
The difference shows up in the details, which is precisely where natural-looking dentistry lives. A veneer that comes back flat, too opaque or a shade too white reads as artificial across a room. Getting it right means controlling subtle translucency, surface texture, length and the tiny irregularities that make real teeth look real, and that kind of fine-tuning is far easier when the person designing your smile and the person crafting it can stand side by side. The result is restorations that blend in seamlessly, rather than announcing themselves. The difference between obvious dental work and natural-looking veneers that simply pass for your own teeth.
No Temporaries to Wear
There’s another advantage to making veneers in-house that patients only fully appreciate afterward: you skip the temporaries entirely.
In a traditional veneer case, your teeth are prepared and then you’re sent home in acrylic temporaries for a couple of weeks while an outside lab makes the real thing. It sounds like a minor inconvenience. It rarely is. Worn for that long, temporaries can:
Stain quickly and look yellow within days, because they’re acrylic rather than ceramic
Irritate the gums, causing swelling, bleeding or even recession, if they don’t fit precisely
Trigger tooth sensitivity, and feel awkward to eat and bite with
Trap food and be genuinely hard to keep clean or floss
Seal imperfectly to the tooth, letting bacteria and plaque seep underneath and weaken the bond
Mislead you, since a temporary is never an exact preview of your final veneers
Because we fabricate your veneers in our own lab, we can avoid that limbo altogether. You’re not living in placeholder teeth wondering whether the final result will match, and you’re not trekking back for repeated appointments and repeated freezing while an outside lab catches up. It’s more comfortable, healthier for your teeth and gums, and far more reassuring, and it’s something practices that outsource their lab work simply can’t promise.
What We Craft in Our Lab
Our in-house lab is behind much of the cosmetic and restorative work we’re known for, including:
Porcelain veneers, shaped and shaded against your face for a truly natural result. Explore porcelain veneers
Crowns and bridges that restore damaged or missing teeth while matching the smile around them. See our general dentistry
Implant restorations — the visible crown on a dental implant, designed with the same cosmetic care as our veneers. Learn about dental implants
Because these are crafted under our own roof, every one is made with your specific smile in mind rather than a generic prescription.
Easier to Get Right, Easier to Maintain
Keeping lab work in-house also smooths out the whole experience. If a restoration needs a small adjustment — a touch more length here, a slightly warmer shade there — our dentists and technicians make it together, on the spot, rather than shipping the case away and restarting the clock. For larger cases like a full smile makeovers, where many restorations have to harmonize with one another, that close coordination is invaluable: every piece is designed as part of the same smile, not assembled from separate orders. And if anything ever needs a repair or replacement years down the road, that’s far simpler to handle too, because the people who made it, and your records, are right here.
More Than 5,000 Veneers, One Smile at a Time
Frequently Asked Questions
Why don't I need temporary veneers?
Because we make your veneers in our own in-house lab, we can complete them without the weeks-long wait that forces other practices to send patients home in temporaries. Skipping that step spares you the staining, gum irritation, sensitivity and uncertainty acrylic temporaries so often bring, and means you’re never living in placeholder teeth that don’t match your final result.
Why does an in-house dental lab matter?
It removes the communication gap that comes with outsourcing. Our dentists and lab technicians collaborate under one roof, refining the shade, shape and character of your restoration against your actual face, which is what makes the difference between a result that looks natural and one that looks obviously “done.”
What does your in-house lab make?
Primarily the cosmetic and restorative pieces where appearance and fit matter most: porcelain veneers, crowns, bridges and the crowns that sit on dental implants.
Do you make veneers on-site?
Yes, all of our porcelain veneers and restorations are fabricated on-site in our own dental lab rather than sent to an outside facility. It’s what lets us control the result so closely, match it to your face, and skip temporaries entirely.
Are in-house veneers better than outsourced veneers?
For natural-looking cosmetic work, the close collaboration an in-house lab allows is a real advantage. Our dentists and ceramists match your porcelain to your face in person, and you skip temporaries entirely. Plenty of skilled outside labs exist, but they can’t sit in the room with you the way our team can.
Seen on Style by Jury
As the show's exclusive cosmetic dentists, Dr. Charkiw and Dr. Afsar designed and crafted smiles for participants across more than 100 episodes — real transformations, filmed and broadcast, that show what thoughtful cosmetic dentistry can do.
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