Once you have whitened your teeth to get a beautiful smile, you need to take some preventative measures to keep your teeth as white as they can be.
Beautiful Smile Tips
You can keep your beautiful smile looking its best by following these tips:
Certain foods, even foods that are healthy, can stain your teeth. Any fruits or vegetables that can stain your clothes or your cutting board will stain your teeth, too, such as beets, cherries, blueberries, and dark green leafy vegetables.
Notoriously hard on the color of your teeth are dark, staining drinks such as coffee, tea, and red wine.
Smoking of course leads teeth to be stained brown and yellow. Every puff you take slightly discolors your teeth.
Ideally one should immediately brush their teeth after consuming anything that stains, but that is rarely possible, so be sure to at least brush twice a day. Idol White teeth whitening can be used regularly to keep stains like this at bay.
Ironically, you should avoid whitening toothpastes or baking soda as they are very abrasive and wear off your tooth enamel. If your teeth begin to get stained, it is actually better for the health of your teeth to go through the whitening process again.
Can You Whiten Your Teeth Too Much?
While normal teeth whitening products and procedures are safe, there are actually some people who whiten their teeth too much. This obsession with having unnaturally white teeth, or being a “bleach junkie” has a medical term – bleachorexia.
According to Dr. Jennifer Jablow, the dentist who coined the term bleachorexia, “Bleaching is very effective in moderation, and it’s safe in moderation. It’s when you’re bleaching all the time, beyond what is recommended — that’s when you run into problems.”
Having an unnaturally white smile is not an accurate indicator of tooth health. Some people overuse whitening products or use several kinds of whitening products at once to the point where their teeth become overly sensitive and the enamel shows signs of erosion.
Ironically, overbleached teeth destroys enamel which makes the teeth more transparent, allowing their naturally yellow to show through. And no amount of bleaching can help this type of yellowing.
So as with most things in life, moderation is key. You want your teeth to be sparking white, but you don’t need to overbleach them to look like rows of Chiclets either. Using one teeth whitening product at a time and following the product’s directions will make sure you don’t whiten your teeth too much.
SOURCE: Bleachorexia: When Teeth Are Never White Enough at ABCNews.go.com
