Effects of outdoor weathering on facial prosthetic elastomers.

Physical weathering is usually responsible for the degradation of maxillofacial prosthetic elastomers and the replacement of prostheses. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of outdoor weathering on the physical properties of four nonpigmented facial prosthetics after 1 year of exposure. In addition, simple mathematical models were developed to correlate the measured properties with irradiation time, including parameters with physical meaning.