Health Blog

Teeth are something that can really disclose your true age. Unfortunately, your white teeth normally get darker as you get older, and that bright smile you had when you were twenty years old might not look as good and turn yellow when you are forty years old. This is especially true if you smoke or indulge in tea and coffee. Dentists can bleach teeth at their office quickly, but this can be expensive. Because of this, many people purchase teeth whitening toothpastes to help brighten their dull teeth. But does that toothpaste really help to make your teeth whiter?

Certainly, the advertisements showing shining white smiles would mislead you to think that all you have to do to get a dynamite smile is brush several times with a specific brand of teeth whitening toothpaste. As it frequently happens, these claims are very overrated. If smoking and drinking strong coffee have made your teeth dull after a lot of years, you probably won’t be able to whiten teeth with just toothpaste by itself.

Teeth whitening toothpastes may indeed remove surface stains and make teeth brighter, but they usually don’t create very noticeable changes in color. Teeth whitening toothpastes are made of abrasives and detergents which can scour the outer surface of your teeth. Another common ingredient is carbomide peroxide, which makes enamel lighter. Unfortunately, for some individuals with stained teeth, the problem is much deeper than the enamel on the surface. As people get older, their dentin, or inner layer of the teeth, gets darker; this makes the teeth yellow, especially since the outer enamel layer tends to get thinner. The dentin layer cannot be reached by teeth whitening toothpastes, so that true teeth whitening cannot be achieved simply with toothpaste. The good news is, despite being more rough than normal toothpaste, they are basically thought of as being safe and won’t damage the teeth too much.

Even though it might not work well to get white teeth with toothpaste, if the yellowing hasn’t reached the dentin level, these pastes might assist with eliminating stains on the surface and lighten teeth somewhat. To obtain powerful teeth whitening power, a greater amount of hydrogen peroxide would be required, which is what is included in dental teeth whitening systems, for instance, found in online tooth whitening bleaching products. Even with formulas that have a lot of hydrogen peroxide for tooth bleaching, it might not work for people who have dark dentin.

What’s the bottom line here? Toothpaste alone might not whiten teeth completely, but it can get rid of smile-dulling surface stains, and costs a lot less than bleaching at a dentist’s office.

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