5 Ways You Can Improve Your Smile Quickly
Achieving Your Best Smile on a Tight Schedule
When you communicate with other people, what do you pay attention to? Whether you realize that you’re focusing on it or not, nonverbal communication (like body language and facial expressions) is a huge part of interacting with other people — clients, coworkers, and family alike. Not only do your teeth help you express a variety of emotions, from joy and surprise to awkwardness and even disgust, but the smile is the feature that most people remember about someone they’ve just met.
When you pair the role our teeth play in our social interactions with the role they play in keeping our jaws healthy and helping us to eat, speak, and even swallow, it’s clear that hardly a moment goes by where we’re not using and benefitting from them! This is why it’s so important for us to take great care of the health, function, and appearance of our teeth. If you’re running on a busy schedule, however, it’s natural to be worried about finding time for lengthy treatments — but don’t worry! There are plenty of options that can help you improve your smile even on a tight schedule. Here are five ways you can quickly improve your smile so that it’s the best it can be.
Rejuvenate Your At-home Dental Routine
A simple, incredibly quick way you can improve your smile right from home is rejuvenating your at-home dental routine. A great oral hygiene routine should include brushing your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste for two minutes twice a day, flossing at least once a day, and using mouthwash by following the directions on the bottle. These steps are incredibly easy and don’t require you to invest a lot of time. Your entire oral hygiene routine will only take five or 10 minutes at most, but it pays off in many ways! It’s the best step you can take to help prevent tooth decay and gum disease, protect your oral and overall health, and ensure that your teeth will be able to continue carrying out their jobs in the long term.
A regular oral hygiene routine also protects the appearance of your teeth by reducing stains on your teeth over time. Plaque build ups are often tinted yellow or slightly brown, so they can also make your teeth appear more stained. Cutting down on plaque build up helps to prevent this and protects your teeth from the plaque, which is full of cavity-causing bacteria.
Use Professional Whitening Treatments
The food and drinks you consume, habits like smoking, and the natural aging process can all cause your teeth to develop stains over time. The good news is that there’s a quick, easy way for you to remove these stains! Professional whitening treatments use a combination of prescription-strength whitening gel and a special light to lighten your teeth by multiple shades in just a single, hour-long appointment at our office. While over-the-counter whitening strips can lighten your teeth, professional whitening treatments provide more dramatic results — and they do so in a fraction of the time. The whitening gel and custom-made whitening trays also ensure even results by reaching and whitening every curve and crevice of your teeth. Simply whitening your teeth a few shades can have a surprising impact on your smile, making it even more beautiful.
Whitening treatments can’t protect against future staining, but there’s plenty you can do to protect against it and keep your smile bright long-term! Limiting habits that stain your teeth, drinking staining beverages with a straw, and practicing great oral hygiene can all make a difference. You can also use whitening toothpaste to brush your teeth and get touch-up treatments at our office about once a year. These steps don’t take much time, but they can keep your smile beautifully white for as long as three years.
Consider Getting Veneers to Revitalize Your Smile
Dental veneers are thin, tooth-shaped pieces of porcelain that are permanently attached to the surface of natural teeth to change their size, shape, and shade. They’re an incredibly popular treatment because of the wide range of dental issues they can help resolve, including closing a gap between two teeth and restoring the appearance of misshapen, cracked, chipped, slightly crooked, or permanently stained teeth. Dental veneers can be applied for purely cosmetic reasons, but they can also actively protect your teeth. When a tooth is cracked or chipped, it’s vulnerable to decay. Placing the veneers over the damaged part of your tooth restores its appearance, but it also seals the vulnerable area off from bacteria, which helps prevent cavities. Veneers can also be placed on teeth that have suffered from enamel erosion to eliminate or cut down on tooth sensitivity or tooth pain that it’s causing.
Perhaps the greatest strength of dental veneers is that they’re incredibly versatile, making them easy to adapt to your treatment needs and wants. They’re applied individually, so you can get a single veneer for one tooth, an entire set to transform your entire smile, or anywhere in between. Plus, you get to choose the size, shape, and shade of your new teeth, ensuring that you’ll love your new smile. Placing dental veneers generally takes two appointments over the course of two or three weeks because they’re made in an outside lab and shipped to us. Once your veneers have arrived, though, Dr. Monroe can place them in a single appointment — instantly transforming your smile!
Restore Damaged Teeth With Beautiful Crowns
Dental crowns are tooth-shaped pieces of porcelain that are placed over your natural tooth to restore its appearance and function while protecting its future health. They’re an ideal way to restore and protect a severely cracked, worn, or broken tooth as well as a tooth that has been damaged by extensive decay or gum disease. In some cases, they’re also used to correct the appearance of a crooked tooth without you having to commit to long-term orthodontic treatment. By covering your natural tooth, dental crowns protect it from future injury and help to seal it off from decay, protecting its future oral health. Treating a severely damaged tooth and placing a dental crown over it resolves tooth pain and gives the tooth its strength back. This is because the porcelain that the crowns are made from is just as strong and durable as a natural tooth.
Dental crowns are as customizable as veneers, allowing you to work with Dr. Monroe to choose their size, shape, and shade so that they blend in with your natural teeth perfectly. Like dental veneers, crowns generally take two appointments to place, but they make an immediate difference in the way your tooth feels, functions, and looks. Plus, they’ll continue to protect your tooth’s health for years to come.
Visit Your Dentist Regularly
Scheduling an appointment with Dr. Monroe every six months is a vital part of improving your smile. During your regular appointment, Dr. Monroe will perform a professional dental cleaning, which actively helps prevent oral health issues like cavities and gum disease. The cleaning also removes hardened tartar from your teeth that you can’t get off at home. Since tartar is often tinted yellow like plaque, removing it can brighten your smile a bit. The appointment also gives Dr. Monroe the chance to spot oral health issues early — before they become a major issue — and provides you with the opportunity to ask him questions about your oral health or oral hygiene routine. These factors both improve your smile by protecting its health, appearance, and function in the long run. So although keeping up with regular dental appointments requires you to make space on your schedule for Dr. Monroe twice a year, doing so saves you the time and expense involved in treating larger oral health issues. Each checkup should take no more than an hour, so that’s a pretty good return for the time you’re investing!
Improving your smile means giving your teeth and gums the care they need to be healthy and to function at their best. This care also impacts the appearance of your teeth, but improving your smile’s appearance can also be an important part of caring for your smile — not just because of their potential to improve its health, but because of their ability to improve your happiness with your smile as well. These improvements don’t have to take a lot of time, but they can transform your confidence in your smile’s health and beauty. If you’d like to learn more about how your Greenville, SC, dentist can help you improve your smile, feel free to call and schedule a consultation with Dr. Monroe at any time.