Bright white teeth are at the top of the wishlist for many people. Teeth have many different important functions including chewing food, forming words, and attracting others. That’s right, your teeth are the first feature that others notice when they meet you so having a white smile is a big confidence boost! This leads to many trying to find at-home treatments for white teeth, but does fluoride whiten teeth? We take a look.
Scientifically, fluoride has been studied and has been found to have useful impacts on your teeth and overall oral health. Naturally found in water, foods, and soil, fluoride is a mineral. There are toothpastes that include fluoride that will help strengthen your tooth enamel, prevent tooth decay, and help remove plaque and biofilm from your teeth, but does fluoride whiten teeth?
Fluoride has many benefits for your oral health, so it may be natural to think that it can whiten your smile. Does fluoride whiten your teeth? Yes, but not in the way you are hoping, and not by itself. Fluoride will help prevent tooth decay and help rebuild your enamel. These benefits not only improve your oral health, but healthy teeth and enamel will brighten your smile naturally, but fluoride won’t erase teeth stains and it won’t whiten your teeth above their natural shade. Fluoride as a mineral won’t do anything by itself, and it will have to be an ingredient in toothpaste to work with other chemicals to help your oral care.
Brushing your teeth is an excellent habit that you should do twice a day, but because fluoride is just a mineral in toothpaste, this whitening treatment is just the same as the other toothpaste that does the bare minimum of brightening your smile. Keeping your teeth healthy and clean is an excellent way to keep a natural smile, but the fluoride toothpaste won’t erase teeth stains from wine, coffee, smoking, tea, or natural age stains. The fluoride is not potent enough by itself or paired with toothpaste to erase these tough stains.
If you want to have your teeth whitened above their natural shade and erase years of teeth stains, there are other options that do work. You can always schedule a visit to your dentist and have them professionally whitened. Your dentist can either do the blue light whitening which may take up to an hour to complete, or they may make you custom whitening trays. Either way, you can expect an expensive bill, some scheduling issues, and the potential need for dental insurance.
At-home teeth whitening kits have become extremely popular over the last 30 years. All of them claim to whiten your teeth and for the most part, they do, but there are some extra benefits of certain teeth whitening kits. While teeth whitening strips, pens, and blue lights do work, they don’t give a complete whitening treatment to your entire set of teeth. Custom teeth whitening trays will give a full treatment and help erase teeth stains from the front, back, molars, and crevices of your teeth. Paired with gel that foams at the contact of your saliva, the gel will foam in the trays that encase your teeth.
Does fluoride whiten teeth? You now know that it doesn’t, but there are other ways to erase years of teeth stains. While getting custom whitening trays from the dentist is one option, it’s not the only one. SportingSmiles has been crafting custom whitening trays since 2009. The nation’s leader in online dental products will send you a patented impression kit where you can take easy-at-home impressions before sending them back to SportingSmiles. From the impressions, SportingSmiles will craft you custom whitening trays designed to erase years of teeth stains in just a few treatments.
