My daughter had braces for about three years. When we took them off, she had white spots on her teeth. I guess those parts of her teeth didn’t get as dirty during her braces. Our dentist suggested we do Zoom Whitening to whiten the remainder of her teeth up to what the other spots were. We went ahead and did that but it didn’t work. Her teeth are still two different colors. What went wrong?

Kaleyn

Dear Kaleyn,

I can tell you are a loving parent who wants the best for their daughter. The problem wasn’t with anything going wrong with Zoom, but rather your dentist prescribed the wrong treatment plan. Any type of teeth whitening procedure, whether at home or in-office like Zoom, will whiten all the teeth evenly. This means while the darker colors on her teeth were whitened, so were the white spots, which left your daughter in the same position.

The spots themselves are not “cleaner” places. In actuality, it is sort of the opposite. The white spots are decalcified sections of her teeth. Those are pre-cavities. This is a fairly common problem with braces. It can be challenging to get the toothbrush between all those metal wires and brackets.

One thing you can try is something called Tooth Mousse. It is supposed to help re-calcify teeth. However, chances are pretty good you will actually end up having to have dental bonding done. With this procedure, a dentist will gently remove some of the decalcified spots and then replace the missing structure with composite bonding.

This has to be done freehand and requires a dentist with some cosmetic expertise. I do not think your current dentist will be able to do this. Teeth whitening is the most basic of all the cosmetic procedures and he or she had a fundamental lack of understanding of how even that worked.

To make sure you go to a dentist who can do this well, look at their smile galleries, specifically their before and after pictures that have to do with dental bonding. Make sure you love their results.

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