Have you noticed how more people have lovely straight teeth these days? Is it because they were born that way? No. Sadly few westerners have good arches and good straight teeth, our diet isn’t good enough. The reason is that more children and more adults are getting their teeth straightened.

Looks great, doesn’t it? But isn’t it just pure self-indulgence? Well, no, at Amsel & Wilkins we think that there is much more to straighter teeth in Banbury than pure vanity.

Cleaning

The most important thing about straighter teeth is that they are much easier to keep clean. If you want to keep your teeth for as long as possible, you need to remove that plaque at least twice a day. Plaque is the sticky film of bacteria that builds up on your teeth throughout the day, multiplying as it feeds on the sugars left from food and drink in your mouth. As they feed, the bacteria give off acids, which erode your tooth enamel (leading to decay) and irritate your gums (leading to gum disease). Leave plaque in place and you’ll lose your teeth to decay or gum disease eventually. But, if you have fewer nooks and crannies for plaque to hide in, your teeth will last longer.

Chewing

Straight teeth that line up along the jawbone evenly distribute the strong forces created when we chew. If your teeth are wonky in some way, chances are that only a few of your teeth are bearing the burden, and, with forces of up to 97kg or 200lbs being created when we chew, it’s easy to see how teeth can just crumble away before their time.

Connecting

Our smile is our most important non-verbal tool of communication. We use it to say hello and signal that we are warm and friendly. People are hardwired to look at smiles to work out if this is a friend or a foe. If you suppress or hide your smile because you are embarrassed, people will probably misinterpret this as a sign of coldness. Using your smile smooths your path through life.

So, there you have it, three very good reasons to invest in straighter teeth. Come and see us to find out more.

At Amsel & Wilkins, we get to see just how much our patients who need teeth straightening love Invisalign in Banbury. And yet, we also know that there are still plenty of people who have never even heard of this revolutionary way to straighten teeth.

It is such a shame because many of those people would leap at the chance to get straighter teeth if they knew there was a way to do so without having to go through the hassle of cleaning stuck food out of their braces, or being on the receiving end of stares and even jokes.

Invisalign totally avoids both of these scenarios by being removable and invisible. It’s one problem with getting it known, no one can see our patients wearing their aligners, so they can’t ask about them and be told, ‘Yes, they’re amazing and I goth them at Amsel & Wilkins’. Instead, people just see teeth magically getting straighter, if they notice at all, because it’s a gradual process. More likely that, someone might say ‘Hey, didn’t you used to have wonky teeth?’ Or more likely not, because we’re British and we don’t do stuff like that.

How does Invisalign work?

Invisalign doesn’t have brackets and wires that are cemented to the fronts of the teeth. Instead it relies on a series of mouth guard-style rigid, very thin, transparent aligners. These snap on over the teeth and are so thin that, at 0.3 millimetres, they disappear when they are in place. Very few people spot them because they’d have to be staring hard into someone’s mouth to do so, and that’s just not polite, is it?

The other great thing about this way of straightening teeth is that Invisalign aligners are removed for eating, and cleaning. This saves a whole lot of time in the bathroom poking about with interdental sticks. It also means that you can continue to eat whatever you like without fear of bunging up or breaking your straightening device.

The aligners do need to be worn for 20–22 hours a day, but people find that doing so keeps their eating on the straight and narrow, and some even lose a bit of weight.