Dental lab technicians don’t typically work in a dental office, although some may!  The typical dental lab technician works in dental laboratories. Here they fabricate restorative, corrective, and therapeutic devices for people’s mouths. These devices may replace a single tooth to an entire arch of the mouth or the entire mouth. It could be a simple cap or crown for an individual’s tooth, a retainer for a child, or even a set of dentures. 

The real challenge for a dental lab technician is to try to replicate the tooth are set of teeth exactly as they are in the patient’s mouth. This means all the perfections of the tooth and in some cases the imperfections!  Unless of course, the patient is doing some kind of “make-over” and then the lab technician becomes more of an engineer creating an optical illusion with the restoration they are fabricating to best please their patient.