Best things to whiten teeth

What whitening product should you use when you only have two months to whiten? Two weeks? Two days?

From teenagers to baby boomers, everyone wants to have whiter smile. Your smile is one of the first things people notice about you, and a flawlessly bright smile indicates health, vigor, and of course, beauty.

With each decade that we age, our teeth can get up to one to two shades darker. The color pigments inside teeth become more prominent as the dentin structure below the enamel grows. Consider the enamel to be like translucent glass, with the dentin structure shining through underneath, giving us our tooth color. Genetics play a large role in the darkening of our teeth extrinsically and intrinsically, but environmental factors, oral hygiene, and nutrition also contribute to the shade of our teeth.

The whitening craze started over a decade ago, when strips and professional whitening lights were introduced to the market, creating a new industry overnight. Since then, over 100 million Americans have whitened their teeth using whitening toothpastes and whitening products.

The standard for whitening has steadily increased over the past decades. What we called a light shade 15 years ago is considered yellow today. To help patients visualize their results, aesthetic dentists like myself have created special bleached porcelains to parallel the heightened whitening expectations that Americans have today.

In the last 12 years, we’ve gained a significant amount of knowledge regarding important factors that affect whitening and what choices people have today.