Snow white smile - this is the stroke that sometimes is not enough to create a perfect image. A dazzling smile gives its owner confidence and ease. What if you study your reflection in a mirror and note with bitterness: it does not shine? .. How to make your teeth white, and we will talk below.
Why are they not white?
There are several reasons why teeth lose natural whiteness. Therefore, before you start teeth whitening, you need to establish this reason.
Congenital discoloration of the tooth occurs during the wrong formation of the tooth, until it is not cut through. Often this is expressed by hypoplasia of hard tissues of the teeth - in other words, underdevelopment. In this case, the tooth enamel has a white or yellowish spot. Affected can be either one tooth or several.
If you live in a city in which there is an elevated fluoride content in the water, there is a high probability of fluorosis. Fluorosis is a disease of the teeth, in which white or yellowish spots appear on their surface. Despite the fact that fluoride is useful, its excess makes the teeth fragile. If you do not stop drinking water with a high content of fluoride, the disease will progress, and gradually the tooth tissues will break down.
Changing the color of the teeth can also be due to the fact that your mother during pregnancy was taking insufficient amounts of calcium-containing foods or taking strong antibiotics. In the case of congenital changes in the color of the teeth, making your teeth white is not easy. Without the help of a dentist can not do. As a rule, the alignment of the color is carried out with the help of tints, selected according to the shade, artificial crowns.
Change in color as a result of dental treatment is most easily corrected. At present, it is not difficult to change the darkened seal on the filling in the tone of the teeth. Also, the tooth may darken after filling the canals or become dull after trauma. In such cases, substances that whiten the tooth from the inside are introduced into the tooth cavity. This is the so-called intra-channel or intra-coronary bleaching.
The color change resulting from the formation of plaque and tartar is the most common problem, due to which many people are thinking about the bleaching procedure. In fact, plaque is perfectly removed by a toothbrush, provided, of course, that the cleaning is carried out correctly and regularly. Leading positions on "blackening" are rightfully occupied by tea, coffee, cola, red wine. Adverse effect on the state of teeth smoking and taking antibiotics.
Clean correctly
We, of course, try to monitor the health of our teeth and regularly pick up a toothbrush and toothpaste. But, despite all our efforts, the data of the World Health Organization is disappointing: 95% of people suffer from caries, and 80% have problems with gums. And only 5% of people properly brush their teeth. Check yourself and find out if you are doing everything right. So:
1. Do you brush your teeth for 3-5 minutes? It is this amount of time that is necessary for the paste to act and make the teeth white.
2. What toothbrush do you use: low and medium hardness or hard? Preferred brushes are medium or low stiffness. Such a brush will not injure the gums and enamel.
3. What brush movements do you do while brushing your teeth? Note that you can not drive to the left or to the left or up and down. Using this technique of cleaning, you just squeeze the plaque. Correct: to do "sweeping" movements from the gum to the tips of the teeth.
4. Do you brush your teeth every time you eat? Meanwhile, many Americans (those we want to imitate in whiteness of teeth) brush their teeth after every, even minor, snack. Still, they have much to learn. Cleaning can be replaced with the use of special rinse aid for teeth.
5. Do you regularly change toothpaste? After all, with time, bacteria get used to a certain composition of the paste and stop responding to it.
6. How often do you buy toothpaste to prevent problems with teeth and gums? Experts recommend that twice a year during one and a half months to prevent the dental diseases, using pastes enriched with fluorine and calcium. If your teeth are sensitive to hot-cold, then it makes sense to use such pastes more often. In addition, one should not forget about the prevention of gum disease and twice a year to spend a half-month course with therapeutic pastes for gums.
Pastes, from which a miracle is expected
How often does it bother us that I'll buy a whitening paste - and the teeth will be white and shiny. But, alas, ah, it is not always possible to achieve the desired result. How does the whitening toothpaste work? The action is based primarily on the friction of solid particles on the enamel. Therefore, its composition can include up to 40% of polishing substances (abrasives). Most often polishing substances are calcium carbonate (chalk) and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Also used is silicon dioxide, which cleans teeth well and, unlike chalk, does not reduce the effectiveness of fluoride additives. As an abrasive can act and titanium dioxide, which is considered to be the best and non-traumatic polishing substance. However, pastes, which contain titanium dioxide, are the most expensive.
What else should I look for when choosing a whitening paste? An important indicator of any whitening paste is the level of abrasiveness: the RDA index, which should not exceed 120 units. If this indicator is higher, you can not buy paste.
Well, the whitening paste is bought, the brush in hand - and go ahead, make your teeth whiter! But keep in mind that dentists strongly recommend not to use bleaching paste more often 1-2 times a week. The thing is that chemical whitening chemicals (such as ammonia, perhydrol) are part of the whitening pastes. But the most interesting thing is that officially dentists do not include whitening pastes to bleaching preparations. They are more intended to maintain the results achieved with professional whitening.
Remember: whitening toothpaste is contraindicated for those who have high sensitivity of enamel, gum disease.
Cleaning
If you can not achieve the result on your own, and your teeth still do not please your freshness and cleanliness, it makes sense to turn to a specialist. In the dentist's office, you will be offered to do a professional cleaning with ultrasound, which is able to remove from the surface of the teeth not only soft plaque, but also tartar. And you can not handle it with a toothbrush.
The process of professional cleaning can be divided into several stages. First, the teeth are treated with a soft buzzing tip, then with a scaler - an ultrasonic nozzle and a water jet - each tooth is cleaned separately and polishing is completed at the end. The procedure will take 30-40 minutes. If the teeth and gums are healthy, then cleaning is not painful. But the procedure will bring unpleasant sensations if there is periodontitis, caries or thinned enamel.
You can also resort to professional teeth cleaning with a sand blaster (Air Flow), which under the pressure feeds on the surface of teeth soda-salt solution. Unlike ultrasound cleaning, the sandblasting device allows you to remove plaque on subgingival areas. However, such cleaning is contraindicated in inflamed gums, and it is not recommended to do it more often than twice a year, otherwise the tooth enamel will become fragile.
As a result of professional cleaning, the teeth will become clean, smooth, polished and will become lighter on tone-semitone. Dentists recommend doing cleaning every six months to maintain the natural color of the teeth. But if the true color of the teeth does not please, then the procedure will not bring the expected satisfaction. In this case, the output is one - bleaching.
Before bleaching
Before deciding on whitening, you need to weigh all the pros and cons. To begin with, you should clarify whether this procedure is not contraindicated to you. Note that bleaching can not be done:
• Minor patients;
• pregnant women and nursing mothers;
• with allergy to hydrogen peroxide;
• with sensitive or damaged enamel;
• with gum disease;
• with caries;
• without consulting the dentist.
Keep in mind that whitening is a serious intervention that is allowed only to people with very healthy teeth. Under the influence of aggressive gels, which are used for bleaching, tooth enamel irreversibly spoils. Therefore, the damaged enamel will have to be strengthened in all possible ways: fluorine and calcium by electrophoresis and physiotherapy.
If you have seals, then after bleaching they will have to be replaced so that they correspond to a new tone of teeth.
Bleached teeth are painted much faster, so you have to forget about coffee, cigarettes and red wine.
Home whitening
You can whiten your teeth not only in the dentist's office, but also at home using special lacquer, gel, strips or kapa. The choice of funds depends on the condition of the teeth and your wishes. So:
The varnish is applied to the teeth with a brush. The result appears immediately, but disappears every other day. If you need a "smile for the evening," whitening lacquer is what you need.
The gel is intended for a slight change in the color of the enamel. Within two weeks of application, the gel will make teeth 1-3 times lighter. For 10-12 days, the gel is applied on a daily basis for two minutes. The whitening gel is easy to use if you need to improve the tone of one or more teeth.
Strips can lighten the teeth by 5 tones and remove dark spots, since they penetrate into the enamel much deeper than the gel. Experts recommend this method of bleaching to inveterate smokers and coffeemakers.
Kapy - the most radical means of bleaching, used at home. They allow to achieve improvement of color of a teeth on 7-9 tones. The procedure of whitening with kapa resembles professional whitening, so without consulting a dentist you can not do. If the kapa does not fit perfectly to the jaw, the teeth can bleach unevenly, there is a risk of damaging the gums.
The result of whitening at home (except for whitening varnish) persists for 2-6 months.
Whichever method of bleaching you choose, do not neglect the advice of the dentist. Only a specialist can identify the cause of darkening of the teeth to make the treatment most effective.
Whitening by the doctor
In dental offices you can choose one of three methods of whitening: photobleaching, chemical and laser. Each of these methods guarantees an excellent result. The only question is the price and duration of the effect.
In the process of photobleaching photopolymers of tooth enamel, which reflect light, are activated by means of a special lamp. As a result, the structure of the tooth enamel changes, the light begins to reflect differently, the teeth become whiter by 6-10 shades.
Chemical whitening. Tooth enamel consists of plates, between which there are molecules of water. The essence of the method is to remove water, making your teeth white. For these purposes, use hydrogen peroxide, which affects the teeth, as well as hair - discolour them. During the procedure, apply kapy, which fill with gel with 30-35% perhydrol content. Peroxide is activated by a halogen-xylene lamp. At the end of the procedure, the teeth are treated with fluoride. As a result, the teeth become lighter by 10 shades.
Laser whitening is based on the principle of burning water, not just light or chemistry, but a laser. To date, laser whitening is considered the safest, although it also destroys the tooth enamel. The procedure is very expensive, due to the high cost of equipment.
Professional cleaning and whitening are different things. If the former is a necessity, then the second is a whim. Do not bleach your teeth without extreme need. Remember that there are no white teeth from nature: someone has yellowish teeth, someone has gray-white teeth. Is the whiteness of their health worth it?