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Pick Your Path For Whiter Teeth

If you are of a certain age, you may remember the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.
Part of the fun of reading these books is they gave the reader the opportunity to decide what would happen next. Of course, you would not know the consequences of your decision until you turned to the right page.
Sometimes you made a great choice. Sometimes you made an OK choice, and sometimes you made a horrible decision.
But those were just books, and you could reread them to follow a different path the next time.
For people interested in teeth whitening, the decision you face may not be as exciting as being a knight on a quest or a time traveler, but they are real decisions. As a result, you will want to choose wisely.
With that in mind, Oregon Smile Care Center wants you to know and understand your options with regard to cleaning your stained teeth.
Consider Your Choices
If you have yellow teeth, you basically have three options if you want them to be white again.
You can run down the store and buy one of the many self-proclaimed whitening products. (They are easy to find since they announce that they are can “whiten” your teeth right on the packaging.)
You can come to our office to get professional whitening products to use at home. If you do this, we will make a tray for you to use with the product.
Your third option is in-office whitening.
What Kind Of Results Can You Expect?
The results will vary depending on your decision and what kind of whitening product you use. We want you to understand what kind of expectations you should have for different products.
➤ Commercial Whitening
We will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you purchased the best commercial whitening product available at your local store. Those products may consist of 10 to 12 percent whitening ingredients.
You may be using some kind of strips or a whitening gel that you put in a tray, which you then hold in your mouth. These products can make your teeth a little whiter over the course of a few weeks if you use them as directed.
This may be good enough for you, and if so, then you may want to go this route.
➤ Take-Home Professional Whitening
If you would rather try professional whitening, then you are welcome to come to our office. We offer Opalescence products for our patients.
Opalescence contains a higher concentration of whitening agents, between 25 and 30 percent, depending on how white you want your teeth to be and how quickly you want to get there.
If you choose to go this route, we will create a custom-fitted tray for you to use. This has some important advantages for you.
The tray is more comfortable since it made just for you. The tray also helps the whitening process. This helps to spread the gel more evenly across your teeth, so your teeth are more uniformly white.
By using this as directed, you will see a marked improvement in the whiteness of your smile. The results will go beyond what you can expect from the over-the-counter brands.
➤ In-Office Whitening
If you are looking for results today, this is the option you will want to use. If you have a special event coming up, like a wedding or a reunion, this is a great way to get camera-ready before your big day.
When you make an in-office whitening appointment, it will take about an hour to complete your treatment. In that time, you will be able to remove years and even decades of stains from your teeth.
One More Thing To Consider
If cost is a factor, your initial thought may be to stick with the commercial whitening products. In the short term, that might be fine, but professional whitening at Oregon Smile Care Center may save you money in the long term.
A single professional whitening treatment is more expensive than the commercial products. However, the over-the-counter brands don’t have a “Whitening For Life” program.
If you come to our Salem, OR, dentist office, you can sign up for our lifetime whitening program. By doing this, we will provide you with two free tubes of whitening gel when you come for your regular cleaning and examination every six months.
You do have to keep your appointments, but you could consider this an incentive to keep your teeth healthy, too.
To learn more about our take-home or in-office whitening, call (503) 809-4784 or contact us with our online form.

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