Do you remember your first apartment in college? I do, and the memories are simultaneously great and not great. The great memories are about the friends and parties and good times that happened there. The bad things are almost exclusively about how gross we were. Four college guys, living away from home for the first time—we had no idea how to do anything domestic. We certainly did not know how to clean. I remember having a bright idea to use Mop & Glo to clean the linoleum floors in the kitchen and bathrooms, but we forgot to sweep the floor. So we trapped a bunch of debris underneath the layer of Mop & Glo.
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For some reason, I still think about what this felt like to walk on with bare feet when I cement a crown. If we don’t clean the inside of the crown before we cement it, we end up with the same gross situation under our crowns. ZR-C by Vista Apex can help make sure this doesn’t happen.
ZR-C is a cleanser made to be used after indirect restoration try-in, just before cementation. It cleanses away the contamination that accumulates on the intaglio of our crown that occurs during try-in. When we get an indirect restoration from our laboratory, it’s pretty and clean. Unfortunately, we have to go through the try-in process, and that contaminates the inside of the restoration with debris. That debris is generally salivary phosphate groups and possibly some heme from the minor gingival bleeding we sometimes encounter.
Unfortunately, we can’t just rinse this away with a little water. We need something more powerful. ZR-C is an aqueous-based universal cleaner made to be a nonabrasive option for any ceramic or metal restoration.
To decontaminate a crown after try-in, rinse and dry the intaglio of the crown with water and air. ZR-C can be applied to the restoration, either from a bottle or a syringe. You don’t need to shake ZR-C prior to use, and its orange color allows easy visualization to make sure you’ve applied it everywhere it needs to be. Let the ZR-C sit on the inside of the restoration for around 20 seconds. Rinse with water and dry. Now, the restoration is ready for priming and bonding or luting with a clean, bondable surface. If applied with a syringe, Vista Apex’s Spira-Flo brush tips are the perfect choice.
Another great thing about ZR-C is the cost. One bottle of 5 ml costs under $35 from Vista Apex’s website. That bottle can decontaminate many restorations, making the cost of use a few cents per crown. If this saves you from even one crown recement, it is a bargain.
Editor's note: This article appeared in the November 2022 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a complimentary print subscription. Sign up here.
