In office vs home teeth whitening

A sparkling white smile is a beautiful thing, but most of us find that our teeth yellow as a result of coffee, tea, wine-drinking, smoking, and other dietary and lifestyle elements that stain our teeth. Some of us just have yellowish tooth enamel. Can it be whitened? Smiling with confidence could be as easy as whitening our teeth. Do we really have to go to a dentist to do it?

So-called home remedies

You’ll find plenty of websites touting simple home-remedies as the tooth whitening solutions you need. There’s just one problem that they fail to mention: a lot of these remedies will actually damage your tooth enamel, and because you have to keep on applying them regularly to get results, the cumulative effects can lead to tooth decay.

For example, you will be told that brushing your teeth with crushed strawberries whitens teeth, or you may hear that brushing with bicarb does the trick. Both of these will whiten your teeth in time by removing stains if used often, but both of them also damage teeth. The only tooth-friendly home remedy we’ve seen is rinsing the mouth with coconut oil, and we can’t vouch for how effective that may be. It certainly won’t give instant results. In addition, none of these remedies will change the colour of your tooth enamel if it is yellowish to begin with.

Over-the-counter remedies

There are lots of over-the-counter tooth whitening remedies ranging from special toothpastes to dental strips that peel stains away, but can only be used on the front teeth. Because the public doesn’t have access to tooth whitening products that require specialized training to accomplish, these treatments leave much to be desired.

Some of them hardly seem to work at all, and although the strips do work to a certain extent, they don’t whiten teeth evenly, often leading to a blotchy appearance. Worst of all, a lot of the whitening products out there can really damage your tooth enamel as badly or worse than the home remedies we just took a look at. Again, all these remedies will, at best, remove superficial stains on teeth.

A tooth whitening kit from your dentist

You can get your cosmetic dentist to provide a home tooth whitening kit, and it will work. But the results will be slower in showing. You will have to apply the treatment several times, and it takes time to complete each treatment. The kit consists of the teeth whitening agent and special trays that keep it on your teeth. You will have to apply it and wait for a prescribed period of time before removing the trays and rinsing.

In-office tooth whitening

The big advantage of in-office teeth whitening is that you can walk in with stained teeth and walk out with sparkling pearly-whites. It doesn’t take long to do the treatment. Dentists apply a whitener, protecting your gums and soft-tissues, and use a laser to activate the whitener – not exactly something that everyone has in their bathroom at home.  During the procedure you may experience sensitivity- we call them “Zingers”, but fortunately they are not permanent and will subside within 24 hours.

If you want whiter teeth, either get a home tooth whitening kit from a proper dentist or go for in office teeth whitening for instant results.