Teeth Whitening

When patients come in our office and want to brighten their smile, there are a few options. In-office treatments are certainly an option. If we're trying to increase the brightness of the tooth and the tooth doesn't have any intrinsic stain inside of it, bleaching with a peroxide-based material chair side is always an option.

We found that still the gold standard probably best way to bleach your teeth is with us making you some custom whitening trays, dispensing a professional strength gel for use at home, and then using that gel usually between 15 minutes to an hour a night for about two weeks. That typically on an average patient will bring us up three or four shades on our shade guide. Obviously there are some patients where whitening with peroxide-based gels is not going to do a lot to increase the the base color of the tooth.

For some of those patients, we have to explore some options. Sometimes porcelain veneers are an option. Change the shape and the color of the tooth at the same time or just change the color of the tooth.

Sometimes on some of those patients, they think their teeth are dark and in reality it's that the enamel is worn on the tooth and we have to end up talking about a more aggressive treatment option to restore their smile such as a crown on the tooth. Typically professional options for whitening are going to be superior to store-bought options. Number one, because they'll all have the ADA seal on it and that little seal on the front of a product that we use professionally means that it was independently tested in a laboratory to be proven safe for patients.

And since that's the case, we feel comfortable using it to provide the bleaching service. A lot of the products that are sold over the counter do not have the ADA seal and are not independently tested. The other reason a lot of our products that we use professionally that we dispense in the office for bleaching are superior is because those products have an anti-sensitivity ingredient in them that many over-the-counter products do not.

So potassium nitrate is a product that we use in sensitive toothpaste to prevent dental hypersensitivity and we also have that same ingredient in a lot of our bleaching products that when you apply the bleach it doesn't make your teeth too sensitive post-operatively.