Shining White Teeth At Home | Beauty Tips - Homemade Beauty Tips
Get a healthy shinning smile with toothbrush, toothpaste & whitener products use at home.
Taking care of your
teeth means more than brushing with a good toothbrush twice a day with a flouridated toothpaste, and visiting
the dentist twice a year, but those are the basics for caring for your smile. As we get older, problems with bad teeth and gums start to show in terms of yellowing, chipping or sensitivity. With age, teeth lose their whiteness and begin to yellow: one sure-fire way to take years off your appearance is by whitening your teeth with a home or professional whitener.
Many
toothpastes claim to be “whitening”, but when you read the label, you’ll see the only active ingredient is
fluoride. Fluoride is necessary for preventing cavities, but it doesn’t do a thing for whiter teeth. Other over-the-counter “whitening” products include baking soda and
peroxide. Baking soda wisdom works by friction: it polishes stains from teeth. But, if your enamel is thin in places, baking soda can wear it further, exposing the dentin layer beneath the enamel. When that happens, you wind up with a brown spot or pit in the tooth. These spots often appear along the gemlike, where enamel tends to wear away naturally and is weak. Whitening toothpastes can’t fix worn enamel: it takes a trip to the
dentist to replace the missing layer with bonding.
Worn enamel comes with age: it also appears in younger people who grind their teeth, people who eat a lot of
acidic foods, and people with bulimia whose enamel has been worn away by stomach acids. People with chronic heartburn or acid reflux disease may also have enamel worn off by acid, but for bruxers (or people who grind their teeth), the enamel comes off because of the pressure exerted by the jaws. The enamel flakes or cracks off under the pressure. If you grind your teeth, your dentist will recommend that you wear a plastic night guard over your teeth at night.
A
beautiful smile starts with great teeth, but genetics can create crooked teeth, under or overbites or even soft enamel prone to cavities. Teeth may become chipped, abscessed or stained. But modern dentistry is highly technical and practically painless. Procedures that once horrified our parents are now done easily and with little fuss: root canals, bonding, white fillings and even tooth replacements are simple dental procedures.
But if you’re going to get a mouthful of teeth worked on, you’re going to still need a pocketful of money. If you live in a city, there may be a dental school taking patients at lower cost, but otherwise, you will want a dental insurance plan that supports the health of your teeth. Most employers don’t pay dental insurance costs, and most health insurers will only cover accidental damage to teeth.
Find inexpensive dental plans that can help you pay the basic expenses associated with getting that gorgeous grin: check them out here.
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Peroxide is the classic at-home
tooth whitening ingredient. Toothpastes like Rembrandt contain peroxide in a dosage that, over a period of weeks or months, has a bleaching affect on teeth by six shades or more. Depending on your teeth’s sensitivity, you may prefer slower-working toothpastes to quick-acting whitening kits. Bleach can make teeth sensitive, so if you try a tooth-whitener, go slow at first, and maybe pair it with a sensitivity-reducing paste such as Sensodyne.
If you’re in a hurry, you can have your teeth professionally whitened in about an hour at the dentist’s for around $300. Your dentist may use a combination of topical bleaching gel and a light activator to get your teeth super-white in no time at all.
If you don’t want to spend several hundred dollars, you have other options. Rembrandt has a new two-hourwhitening system (Rembrandt 2-Hour White from www.drugstore.com) that uses trays and a gel to whiten teeth in a much shorter time than the usual two-week period needed for other whiteners. You leave the trays on for 20 minutes, then take them out for ten minutes, alternating until the two hours are up. Or you can try other popular at home whiteners, like Crest White Strips, which take about a week to complete the whitening process.
