Give Your Smile a Makeover This Year
Some minor problems stand between you and your dream smile; this is the year you want to address them. Here’s a look at how we can turn good smiles into great ones.
It’s no secret that a winning smile is one that’s backed by bright teeth, so you do your best to keep your pearly whites, well, white. Despite your efforts through daily care, yellowing begins to creep in, leaving you with a lackluster smile that doesn’t dazzle as it once did.
At Peninsula Dental Excellence, our team of highly skilled dental experts, led by Drs. Jeff Yoshihara and Colin Au, understands the many forces that can rob your teeth of their once-white brilliance.
In the following, we explore why your teeth may be yellowing and a few of the ways we can help you smile again with confidence.
There are several culprits behind yellowing teeth, including:
Your teeth are protected by enamel, which is what gives them their white color. Over time, your enamel can begin to wear down, allowing the yellow/brown dentin inside to slowly show through.
While aging is the primary culprit behind yellowing teeth, staining from the outside can also lead to discoloration. Foods and drinks with artificial dyes, coffee, tea, wine, and smoking can all leave their marks on your teeth, creating discolorations that no amount of brushing seems to clear away.
Certain medications can also cause your teeth to take on a yellow hue, including tetracycline, doxycycline, and minocycline. Outside of antibiotics, antihistamines, antipsychotics, and some blood pressure medications can lead to yellowing in your teeth. As well, certain chemotherapy medications and radiation treatments can discolor your teeth.
No matter how your teeth got to the point where they’re more yellow than white, the good news is that we can help.
One of the first lines of defense for restoring your pearly whites are our professional teeth whitening services. If you want to whiten your teeth by several shades in just one visit, we apply a powerful bleaching solution to your teeth and then use a special UV light to activate the whitening. This quick-and-easy process allows you to walk out with whiter teeth that same day.
If you’d prefer a more gradual approach to teeth whitening, you can try our at-home whitening system. With this approach, we supply you with trays that you fill with a special whitening agent and place over your teeth every day for 2-10 hours at a time. Over the course of 2-3 weeks, your teeth will gradually whiten and brighten.
If your teeth resist these whitening efforts, you may want to consider dental veneers, a procedure in which we place thin “shells” over the fronts of your teeth. With veneers, we can not only brighten your smile, we can also cover up minor imperfections in your teeth.
The bottom line is that if your teeth are yellowing, rest assured that we have a solution. To get started, contact our office in Mountain View, California, to set up your appointment.
