Best Teeth Whitening Treatments

All teeth whitening treatments are not the same.  Over the counter whitening kits are not as strong as the professional dental take home kits are.  Professional whitening kits therefore produce better and more predictable teeth whitening.

Professional take home kits have different features.  Some have desensitizing ingredients and others don’t.  This can be very important because approximately 20% of the population will have sensitive teeth as a result of doing teeth whitening.

There are different concentrations of the active whitening agent in take home whitening kits.  Most of the whiteners use carbamide peroxide (a stable version of hydrogen peroxide) as the active whitening agent.  There are various concentrations of the carbamide peroxide available.  The take home kits come in 10%, 16%, and 22% carbamide peroxide.  The higher the concentration of the active agent, the more likely the teeth will be sensitive from the whitening and although you may think you would get a faster whitening or a better whitening, that hasn’t proven to be true, so a lower concentration makes sense.

With research, over time the take home whitening kits we use for our patients have improved.  When they first came out people had to wear the whitening trays overnight, but now, depending on the brand, the daily whitening time can be an hour or even 30 minutes.  Within 2 weeks most people are happy with the whitening results and some people get the results they want in 5-6 days!  It’s easier to whiten yellowish teeth than teeth that are gray or brown in shade.

We’ll talk about 1-hour whitening in another blog post.

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