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.

You may have noticed a sustained increase in the number of adults getting their teeth straightened in Banbury. Maybe you haven’t, but at Amsel & Wilkins, we certainly have.

There are a few reasons why you might have noticed the steady increase in adults wearing braces. Firstly, you are probably not obsessed with teeth, so you don’t go about your daily business clocking what everyone is hiding behind their lips, like we do.

Secondly, these days, unless someone has got some serious issues with the way their teeth bite together, the chances are they will be wearing a much more discreet kind of braces than the traditional heavy duty metal braces, affectionately known as train track braces.

Thirdly, if just the teeth are being moved, it’s possible to get straighter teeth in 6 months in Banbury, or maybe even less, depending on what the issues are.

Bracket and wire

There are 3 ways to get your teeth straightened. The fixed bracket and wire braces of old are still available, but, if they are only straightening teeth, they can use much gentler forces to do the job. This means they can get away with using smaller brackets, which are sometimes made of clear ceramic, depending on the brand, and the wires can be tooth-coloured. All this adds up to braces that no longer dominate the teeth.

One brand uses this system, but fixes the brackets to the inside of the teeth, next to the tongue. These are called lingual braces and they are invisible. They can also cope with more complex issues than some other discreet systems.

Invisible aligners

These aren’t even braces, but 3D printed mouth guard style aligners. Instead of having wires to tighten, the patient uses a series of aligners, each of which uses the pressure created from not quite fitting properly to nudge the teeth along. A push rather than a pull. The aligners are almost invisible over the teeth, but can be removed, which makes eating, drinking and tooth brushing as easy as ever.

Front teeth aligners

These uses spring-loaded aligner bows that reposition the front teeth only. This removable appliance also doubles as a retainer and treatment can take as little as 6 weeks.

The thing with being around teeth all day is that you can tend to become somewhat obsessed with them. Sometimes at Amsel & Wilkins, we find that our passion for a really great smile means that even in our private lives it’s impossible not to notice the state of people’s teeth when we first meet them. ‘Oh, she’s got quite some crowding going on there and her incisors never really did descend properly’ or ‘Wow! Now that’s what I call an amazing smile! White but not too white, straight but not overpoweringly uniform teeth.’ Those might be the thoughts going through our minds as we pay for our petrol or chat to new acquaintances at parties.

Sometimes we think, ‘Now if you’d had your teeth straightened 20 years ago, you wouldn’t soon be needing a visit to the dentist to deal with that gum disease that’s forming from all that tartar that’s built up on your teeth.’

Never too late

The thing about braces, is that it is never too late to get straighter teeth. The early teens may be the optimum time for sorting out issues to do with misalignments but that’s because the jawbone is still growing and so it’s possible to deal with misalignments in the jaws, where the teeth don’t meet properly. This is a separate issue from wonky teeth, but wasn’t treated as such back in the day.

Teeth can be moved around in the jaw at any time in life. It’s just a case of applying sustained pressure to the tooth in one direction. After 72 hours of this pressure, the jawbone responds by breaking down bone matter in front of the tooth in the direction of the pressure and building up bone behind it. The thing that takes all the time to move is not the teeth, but the bite. So, in fact, in Banbury you can get straighter teeth in 6 months, rather than 2 or 3 years.

Straighter teeth are healthier teeth because they provide fewer hard-to-clean places for plaque and tartar to build up and harbour the bacteria that lead to gum disease, which causes teeth to fall out.