Or is restoring a former brilliance of your teeth impossible through normal dental hygiene practices without cosmetic dentistry?
In: Biology
Because teeth aren’t perfectly white! Enamel is naturally slightly yellow. Making teeth whiter is very easy to photoshop in ads, but in real life the only way to get perfect white teeth is with bleaching. Sure, some of the color in your teeth comes from staining – but not all of it.
Stains aren’t the same thing as plaque or dirt. Staining is in the tooth like dye on cloth, not on the tooth like paint on a wall. One of the best ways to prevent teeth from darkening is to simply swish with water after drinking your coffee or tea (or brush your teeth if you’re at home). That way the residue from the tea/coffee isn’t sitting around getting absorbed into the enamel.
Teeth need to be whitened with something that can oxygenate the enamel and allow the bleaching effect to take place. That’s why most at-home whiteners like Crest White strips or whitening mouthwash contain hydrogen peroxide in the formula, as do most professional whitening solutions available from the dentist.
These formulas open the enamel “pores” to oxygen, but this also leaves teeth vulnerable to sensitivity. Some people will experience pain which is why professional strength treatments are only available by a dentist’s prescription. They need to monitor how you are doing and make sure you don’t hurt yourself, you’d be shocked what some people will endure for vanity.
It’s not just coffee or tea either. We had a patient who’s whitening wasn’t working and her teeth were turning a strange pale purple ish color. We figured out it was because she was ignoring the “no colored beverages” rule. She kept drinking bright red and blue Gatorades & somehow didn’t think of them as being a colored beverage. Basically we we giving her a solution to open her enamel and she was pouring dye right in there! She had to pay for even more treatments as a result.
At my old dentist office we would need to encourage people not to keep whitening because the teeth were starting to look unnatural. Nobody naturally has paper white teeth, I would tell them, “no lighter than the whites of your eyes if you want the teeth to look real”.
Dentist billboards are lies. Teeth are not naturally white, they’re *ivory*. That’s slightly yellow-ish.
Dentist office billboard is white probably due to the fact that it was cheaper to make white and simple banners back in the day, like with a WWF’s panda
Because advertisements are lies. Natural teeth are NEVER the colour of bleached paper, and they were never that colour, not even when you got them.
In tooth anatomy in dental school the tooth is described as having an yellow-white colour gradient from yellow-ish white at the base to ivory to translucent-white at the top, at least for the frontal teeth. They are not a single colour, and most certainly that colour is not pearly white.
The other answers here are also correct.
Don’t believe ads. They are not your friend.
Plaque is a figment of the liberal media and the dental industry to scare you into buying useless appliances and pastes. Now, I’ve heard the arguments on both sides, and there is nothing to convince me of the need to brush your teeth.
Realy ELI5 –
Imagine you drop some spaghetti on your white shirt. It will stain it. You can get some soap and a brush and scrub it, over and over until the stain is less visible, and maybe even gone. But doing so will cause the shirt to erode or tear. You’ve damaged the fabric.
That’s what happens to your teeth (and gums), you’ll damage them. There are other things like whiteners to help do it without the excessive scrubbing. Like the Tide-to-go pens… helps with stains without the extra scrubbing.
Teeth are not naturally pure white; they have to be bleached to be that way.
And even then, brushing too much will damage your gurms, basically scrubbing them raw where they meet the tooth.
Brilliant white teeth are not healthy. Teeth are meant to be more of a pearl colour.
Not sure how this bizarre idea of weirdly white chiclet teeth being healthy came from.
Enamel is basically almost transparent white tinted glass with 0.1 to 3 millimeters thick, dentin on the other hand is yellowish even brownish opaque tissue and more thick than 3mm. With time the dentin gets more yellow/brown so the natural color of your teeth when young is clearer, but as you get older it starts getting darker. There is a difference between clean teeth and white teeth that a lot of patients don’t really understand. Probably in billboards as in tv/magazines/famous people the teeth are whitened or photoshopped to look whiter, so people tend to look for that but please remember it is not natural. Bleaching your teeth can be done with almost 0 consequences while performed by a dentist, personally I don’t offer it to patients as it is only an esthetic thing. Hope this helps
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