Cosmetic Dentistry

What is teeth whitening?

Teeth whitening is a common practice in general dentistry and it's becoming even more common in the last few years.
Everybody wants a white smile, some people even get paranoid about it. Many
people believe that white teeth are the greatest contribution to
a perfect smile and a perfect smile makes others look at you in a different way for sure. Our smile is like our trademark image, others always get a nice image if we have a nice smile.
As a person gets old, teeth often become darker and stained due to many factors including a change in the mineral structure, type of food, smoking habits, genetic type of enamel and dentin, low hygiene etc etc…

Dentists can choose from a wide range of teeth whitening systems, but what really matters in the end is the percentage of carbamide peroxide in the gel; it varies from 5% to 30%, depending of the manufacter but the only percentage aprooved by the ADA is 10%. Above that there seems to be no evidence that they're totally safe.

Regularly using a whitening toothpaste, which may have a very small amount of peroxide in it, may help keep teeth bright longer but that toothpaste don't often do any whitening by themself, you'll always need some whitening system so that you'll have nice and white teeth.

Whitening systems are almost all the same procedure steps...
You just brush your teeth very well, fill the plastic trays with the whitener gel, and squish them onto your upper and lower teeth and stay with it for a few hours, around 2 to 3 hours.

The resulting whiteness can last for years or months, depending on your lifestyle and how often you brush your teeth, smoking and coffee habits etc etc.

Only about 8-10% of people claim to be satisfied with the colour of their teeth. Routinely eating and drinking foods and liquids that stain tooth enamel will dull the effect more quickly so dentist himself gotta advice the patient if he sees that it's not a good candidate to bleaching products.

If someone has caps on the front teeth, for example, the bleached part of the teeth may turn lighter than the caps and so the dentist must take that in care before giving that kind of patient a bleaching product or else the patient may complian at the end of the bleaching.

posted by Kabum @ 6:39 AM