Wouldn’t it be lovely if there was a way you could programme your teeth so that they moved all by themselves into their correct positions?
You could carry on with your life, eating and drinking whatever you wanted, taking the same amount of time to clean your teeth, and every day your teeth would shift a tiny bit towards being properly lined up. No one would point and stare. No one would ask you personal questions. No one would be any the wiser. Every now and then someone might say, “Hey, you look great”, but they wouldn’t be able to say exactly why.
So much better than having great metal blocks and cables all over teeth. If only it were possible.
Well, in a way, it is, if you come to College Street Dental Centre in Petersfield. Here, we offer a great straightening system called Invisalign. It does the same job as bracket and wire braces, but uses clear aligners that look like mouth guards instead.
Invisalign was the brain child of an American university student who wished he could have got his teeth straightened with his retainer (more about those later) rather than fixed braces.
He got together with some other students and they developed Invisalign. These are very thin, clear plastic aligners that cover your teeth. Inside each one are precision placed pressure points that press on your teeth to get them to move. You keep up the pressure by working your way through a series of aligners over around a year, wearing each one for 7-10 days.
The plastic is so thin that no one can see the aligners over your teeth. And, they come out for eating and drinking, so you can continue to eat whatever you want and brush your teeth as before.
Once you have completed your treatment, you will have to wear a retainer. This holds your teeth in place while the newly formed bone settles down around them and the fibres that hold the teeth in their sockets shrink back to fit.
Then you will have those lovely straight teeth, and no one will be have noticed how they have been moved. Great, isn’t it?
