What is putting you off getting your teeth straightened? Is it the idea of having lumps of metal cemented onto your teeth for months on end, and not being able to eat what you want, having to spend ages cleaning bits of food out of your braces and getting sore patches inside your cheeks? We agree, it’s enough to put anyone off getting their teeth straightened, especially if their teeth are only mildly to moderately misaligned in the first place.
However, there is an alternative to traditional braces and because it is pretty much invisible when it is on the teeth, we can forgive you if you have never come across it before. It’s called Invisalign. In Stanmore, we have been offering Invisalign at Centre of Dental Excellence for some time now.
Invisalign has no brackets or wires. Instead it uses aligner trays that look like mouth guards made of out very thin plastic.
But inside each aligner from Invisalign in Stanmore are ridges and bumps that press on your teeth to move them into a new position. Treatment is progressed by you wearing a series of these aligner trays; how many of them depends on your individual issues.
You wear each one for 7-10 days. For the first few days, it will feel like it really doesn’t fit properly, but as the days progress, that discomfort will ease, until it disappears altogether. Then, your aligner fits, it’s time to get rid of it and put in the next in the series. You keep doing this until the whole series of aligners have been worn, which takes, on average, a year, for the full treatment. If you have a very mild issue, you can have Invisalign Lite, for which you get 14 aligners, or i7, for which you get 7 aligners.
You can take your aligners out to eat and clean your teeth, but you must wear them for at least 20 hours a day if you are not to interrupt the alignment process.
When treatment is over, you will need to wear a retainer while the bone settles down around your newly positioned teeth.