What Is Dental Gold?

Video Transcript

"Gold is often times a material found in dentistry that people will use in different aspects of dentistry such as crowns, bridges, fillings, sometimes even dentures and partial dentures. One must understand that with dental gold a lot of people are under the misconception that it is 100% gold and almost always it is never 100% gold. What you typically find is a dental tooth or a crown or a bridge is often similar to a piece of jewelry such as a ring or a necklace and what that means is if you actually melted that down you would find that only a percentage of the metal is actually gold so typically in a ring or a necklace you may find that while it is called a gold ring or a gold necklace that it is only about 70% gold and what happens is they add other metals into that to basically add to color and strength and filler much like with the dental crown or gold bridge. What happens is they will typically put approximately 60 to 70% gold in the material but there is other metals that are added to that to again add filler and add color. For example you may hear of alloys. Alloy is basically a combination of metals and a gold crown is an example of an alloy. What that means is it has a combination of possibly, gold, silver, tin, copper and there are multiple other metals that could be incorporated into that so when we talk about dental gold while gold is primarily the most important ingredient in the recipe of the tooth there are other also other metals that are added to that so a gold crown is composed of multiple materials but gold is predominantly the most important one."