Menu

Keeping Your Teeth White Between Dental Visits

About Me

Keeping Your Teeth White Between Dental Visits

Taking care of your teeth might seem mundane, but without enough attention, those pearly whites of yours can easily turn tinged and stained. Sure, having your teeth cleaned every few months at your dentist's office is a great start to maintaining a beautiful smile, but it isn't enough to keep each tooth pearly white on an ongoing basis. Now, don't get me wrong – you don't have to spend an arm and a leg on professional maintenance in order to get the results you want. You can use a variety of methods at home, like creating your own whitening mouthwash, that can help to keep you teeth white between dentist visits. Hopefully, the tips and techniques offered on this blog is enough to get you the results that you're after.

What You Need To Know About Dental Bonding

23 March 2015
 Categories: Dentist, Blog

What can you do about chipped or cracked teeth? How can you improve the appearance of your smile when you have unattractive spaces between your teeth, or very noticeable discoloring? How can you protect the roots of teeth where your gums have receded?

One popular solution is bonding. Bonding is a dental treatment that repairs and reshapes teeth with the use of dental resins. If you want to upgrade the appearance of you natural teeth without actually replacing them, ask your dentist about bonding. The following is information on how bonding is done and its advantages.

How is bonding done?

  • Your dentist will roughen the tooth surface and apply a conditioning liquid. The conditioning liquid will help the bonding material to stick to the tooth.
  • The resin bonding material is attached to the tooth in layers by using a high-intensity light to harden each layer.
  • It takes several minutes for each layer to harden, and your dentist will continue to add layers until the desired depth is achieved. Your dentist will choose a final layer that matches your exact tooth color.
  • Your dentist will then sculpt the hardened bond resin to the shape of your natural tooth. This action is not painful, because he is not actually filing or scraping your actual tooth.
  • Your dentist will polish the bond until it looks like a real tooth.

Advantages of tooth bonding:

  • Dental bonding is relatively inexpensive compared to other cosmetic procedures.
  • When treating just one tooth, one visit to the dentist is usually sufficient, and the procedure can be completed in an hour or so.
  • When repairing a chipped or broken tooth, or closing gaps, bonding is probably the easiest method to use.
  • No anesthesia is required for this procedure.
  • Bonding causes minimal damage to the tooth enamel and requires the least amount of tooth loss as compared to other tooth repair methods.
  • Dental bonds do not require any special care, other than good oral hygiene. The bonds can last for at least four years and in some cases up to ten. (For best results, avoid biting your nails or chewing on hard objects like pencils or pens, to avoid chipping the bonds)

Before you consider braces, teeth whitening, or any other timely and expensive dental treatment, ask your dentist, like those at Nittany Dental Associates, about tooth bonding. If it is a treatment that can make your smile more beautiful literally over night, it is a treatment that is definitely worth considering.