IT'S probably fair to say that a 25-year cigarette and Diet Coke habit isn't the best way of keeping your gnashers pearly white.
And as teeth age, they become yellow anyway, meaning that a lot of 40-somethings are left with stained teeth and will do almost anything to return them to their former glory.
My mum, Joanne Walton, is 47, and has bought tooth whitening treatment
s from the chemist and over the internet.
She has also tried tooth whitening chewing gums and, at the tender age of 16, splashed out on “Pearly Tooth Enamel”, which saw her clamp open her mouth with cotton wool and daub gunk over her teeth until it set and could be peeled off to reveal whiter toothipegs.
She spent up to £10 a pop on tubes of whitening toothpaste, and has done just about everything she could to get rid of the stains on her teeth – except book an appointment with a dentist.
Disappointed with the results she saw with the self-styled miracle bleaches she bought off the internet, she recently informed me that she was considering flying to Poland to have her tooth whitened by a dentist on the cheap.
I booked her an appointment with a dentist.
Dental Surgeon Bev Brabbins has been offering teeth whitening procedures at Newborough Dental Surgery for the past six years. She typically carries the treatment out on around three patients a month.
“Quite a few men come for teeth whitening,” she said.
“They don’t seem embarrassed about it, and when I ask them if they want to read the information beforehand, they say ‘no, no, let’s just get on with it,’ whereas women tend to want to read things and go away and think about it.”
The youngest person she had seen was 16, and she said that while teeth yellowed with age, yellow teeth can be hereditary, and they can also appear if a child’s mother took the antibiotic Tetracycline while breastfeeding.
“Smoking, red wine and blackcurrant juice are all bad for the teeth,” she said.
“But the very worst thing you can do to your teeth is drink fizzy drinks. If you left a tooth in a glass of cola overnight it would be gone in no time.”
As she peered into Joanne’s mouth, Bev said she saw staining she would expect of teeth of that age, plus some cigarette staining.
“It’s good that you haven’t got any crowns at the front,” she said. “Crowns don’t lighten and so if they are whitened, they would be a different colour from the rest of the teeth.”
Joanne, of South Parade, Peterborough, was told to bite into some Polyfilla-like stuff, so Bev could make casts of her upper and lower sets of teeth, and asked to come back in a week’s time.
A week later and she was handed a thin plastic mouthguard which had been designed to fit her teeth exactly, six syringes of 10 per cent carbamide peroxide mixture and the casts of her teeth in case she lost her mouthguard and needed a replacement making.
She had to squirt a tiny amount of solution into her mouthguard each evening after she had her tea, and leave it there for four hours.
The mouthguard is so thin and delicate Bev said that clients could sleep with it in. The peroxide solution stops working after four hours, making it impossible to “overdose” on it.
Bev recommended that Joanne use the solution on her upper teeth first, so she can see how her teeth are changing by comparing the upper teeth with the lower teeth.
The treatment needs to be done for four hours, seven days a week, for between two and four weeks.
