I need to get a dental crown and wanted to touch up the whitening on my teeth first. My dentist provided me with Opalescence PF 20%. What I need to know is how long I need to use it and for how often before I schedule the crown. Can you give me any guidelines?
Yvonne
Dear Yvonne,
One thing which I want to bring up immediately is my concern that your dentist isn’t guiding you on this himelf. Is he unaware of how this works? It is a possibility. If that is the case, it would mean taking a big step back and deciding whether or not you want this dentist to be the one to do your crown. This is especially true if, as I suspect, it is a visible tooth.
If your dentist is mainly engineering-minded, you may end up with a functioning crown, that fits well, but you will be disappointed in the look of it.
As for the teeth whitening, there are a variety of factors involved. How white do you want them? There isn’t really a whiteness cap. The bottom line is the longer you wear the whitening trays, the whiter they get. How much you wear them each day, depends completely up to you. As long as you aren’t experiencing sensitivity you can wear them for as many hours a day as you can tolerate. You really need a minimum of 20 to 30 minutes for the gel to adequately seep into your teeth.
If it’s possible for you to wear them overnight, you will get faster results. Our saliva production slows down at night. That enables the whitening gel to stay on your teeth even longer. During the day, you can wear it as much as you’d like as well, but your saliva will slowly seep into your teeth whitening trays and wash away the gel, requiring you to reapply the gel several times a day.
One definitive is the waiting period between the whitening and the crown development. I suggest waiting two weeks between the time you get the whitening to the color you want and the dentist making your crown.
Who Should Do Your Crown
As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t appear that our dentist has a lot of cosmetic skills. A dental crown, especially one on a front tooth requires a lot of technical knowledge as well as artistry. This is something I would want you to get an expert to work on. Because cosmetic dentistry isn’t an actual recognized specialty, it is up to the dentist how much they invest in the training.
I’d start by looking for a dentist who is AACD accredited. While they are the top 1% of cosmetic dentists in the country, there aren’t very many of them. If you can’t find one in a reasonable distance to you, there is another list you can check. The mynewsmile.com website also lists expert cosmetic dentists by area. They’re not all AACD accredited, but they do all have expertise and artistry. Any of them can give you a beautiful crown which blends in perfectly with the rest of your teeth.
This blog is brought to you by Tulsa Dentist Dr. Jerome Cha.