2004 Volume 24 Issue 3 Pages 261-266
Recently, composite resins for facing crowns have been widely used for natural colored prosthetic materials. However, over time the colors of these materials undergo changes. Therefore, color changes of 6 kinds of composites, which were immersed in filtered coffee, were examined in our previous study. The results of the experiment indicated that all the composites showed visible color changes after one week of immersion in coffee. Moreover, enamel paste showed poorer color stability than dentin paste. Similarly, non-polished surfaces were more discolored than polished surfaces.
In this study, we examined the surface hardness of the samples, which were used in our previous study, as the degree of cure. The relationship between color changes and surface hardness of composite resins were investigated.
As a result, polished surfaces showed less discoloration and greater surface hardness than the non-polished surfaces for all brands of resin tested because polished surfaces may have a higher degree of cure than non-polished surfaces. However, there was no correlation between color intensity and surface hardness of all resin brands tested.
