Invisalign - The First Four Weeks

So getting ready for your Invisalign is a little bit of a faff. Lots of those horrible teeth casts to be done and some rather unattractive photographs. These go off to be put in the computer (along with some hilarious x-rays if, like me, you refuse to remove all your piercings) and then you go back to have a look at what can be done and find out how long you will need to wear the trays for - and therefore how many trays you will be getting. In my case it will be 45 weeks (this is the aim - it could be that we need to readjust slightly after the 45 weeks) so 45 trays.

Brilliant 1 Week Tooth Whitening Kit from Superdrug

I have quite big teeth. It's one of the first things a lot of people notice about me. So when I got married I spent a small fortune on getting them whitened by my dentist. You have your own set of gum shields made and this scary stuff that you squeeze into them every night from what looks like a giant syringe and then the occasional shooting pain of hyper-sensitivity during the day after you've been whitening for a while. But the effects are amazing so I was pleased that I'd done it.

Now although my teeth looked incredibly white and I can just go an buy top ups of the whitening paste for £15 from most dentists I wanted to know if you could get similar results from drug store teeth whitening kits and my husband was the perfect person to try it out on. I cruelly refer to his teeth as brown stumps - they aren't actually very bad but he never goes to the dentist and spent most of his time between the ages of 16 and 30 smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and red wine so they are stained and being a boy, it's never really bothered him that much.

I ordered some gum shields for a couple of pounds from Amazon and decided that I would walk out of my front door and go to the first chemist I found (except the Campbells right at the end of my road... that place is expensive!) and get the most reasonably priced teeth whitening kit I could find. I ended up in Superdrug and for £5.99 I bought a Brilliant 1 Week Tooth Whitening Kit.

If I had my time over I would probably skip buying the gum shields first. Yes you can hold them in hot water and then mold them to your teeth so you feel like every tooth is getting it's very own whitening attention but they aren't actually that easy to mold and in fact the bottom set hardly worked at all. Most teeth whitening kits come with a shield/tray of some sort and I would say that that is good enough to use. You can always dab the whitening paste onto your teeth with your finger before them applying the shield as instructed to make sure every tooth is getting some whitening action.

Now we were supposed to use this for five minutes twice a day but because we were both using it we've just been doing it once for five mins at bath time. I did not expect to see anything impressive and because the gum shields are so unwieldy we spent a lot of those five minutes sniggering and trying not to dribble everywhere but honestly after three days I could see Joe's teeth were at least 1 shade whiter. And so far there hasn't been any of the  hyper-senstivity that I got when I was using the overnight whitening process.

I'm a complete convert to at-home whitening. I am pleased that for my wedding I got the full works because now I can just top that up with the drug-store kit when I need to and my teeth look super-white within a couple of days but Joe was never going to spend the time or the money getting his teeth whitened (and I have to say I think men with whitened teeth look a little bit odd) but just to get them a few shades whiter with minimal effort and input from him this kit has been fantastic. If you don't have the budget, or you don't want the hassle of doing this through your dentist or if you are lucky enough to just not need extreme whitening I would really recommend trying one from your local chemist.

White Teeth

Having spoken to another bride-to-be I've decided to get my teeth whitened. She was really pleased with the results and I've always suffered from patchy, stainy teeth. As I've been using the wedding as a goal to sorting myself out I decided to give it ago. It's not cheap at £350 but you do get gum shields that you should be able to use for life and a plaster cast in case you need to make new shields for any reason. The whitening gel costs £15 a syringe and I find a syringe lasts 6ish days. When you start you get five syringes and a syringe of gel to stop any sensitivity.

And I'd really say I (so far) feel like I've got my monies worth. My teeth are looking so much better and I actually feel so much more confident about them (they're quite big!). They have been quite sensitive. I've been using Sensodyne tooth paste and have had two or three moments with serious sensitivity in one tooth. However, this was only for five seconds at a time and I used the sensitivity gel twice in all so it really hasn't been a problem for me. Now they've been whitened I've got to get to get the front filling re-done to match the new teeth (I fainted on concrete and lost half my front tooth). I don't hate the dentist but I really, really hate injections. I'm a bit nervous.

I've done it for a month so now I'm waiting to see how they even up. You have to wait for a week or so to let the bleach settle out of the teeth so you can really see how the whitening has worked. Really want to get the filling colour right - the less dentist the better I think. People have been telling me that my teeth look great (I'm a bit worried after watching a certain episode of Friends but I've been told I'm not there yet). So far so good. I have to say I'm really surprised that I'm doing this... it's really not the usual thing I do. And I'm so pleased it's working xx