Natural Teeth Whitening : What to Watch Out For

As any dentist will tell you, the absolute best way to keep your teeth healthy and your smile nice and white is to perform regular dental hygiene procedures at least twice a day including brushing and flossing.  Even so, either as a result of smoking or frequent consumption of tea, coffee, or other products known to cause tooth discoloration this is not always enough to keep your smile as white and bright as you would like it to be.

If you look online these days there are a number of different natural teeth whitening tips and tricks to help people whiten their teeth easily and cheaply at home without having to resort to expensive cosmetic dental procedures.  Many of these natural teeth whitening techniques are very effective and have been proven to fairly quickly whiten your teeth.  Some of them, however, when used incorrectly, can do more harm than good.  This article is designed to highlight some areas to watch out for when trying some of them out.

The biggest misconception and probably the one you have heard the most frequently is to use different kinds of fruit to cleanse your teeth and the most frequently recommended one is lemon.  Lemon is used as a cleansing agent for a wide variety of things with many people using lemon as an additive when they are cleaning kitchen or bathroom surfaces.  You also see lemon as a frequent additive in washing up liquid and cream surface cleaning products.  The reason lemon is good as a natural cleaning agent is the high level of acidity present in the juice.

As a result whitening, your teeth using lemon juice will provide you with a whiter smile for a while but over the longer term, you will see the effect acid has on calcium as they don’t agree to work together and frequent use of lemon will eat into your tooth enamel or damage a dental implant causing erosion and permanent weakening of your teeth.  Before you wonder if this can happen if you like lemon in your tea don’t worry, when you consume lemon as part of a drink or a meal the acidity is not present in your mouth for long enough to cause damage but scrubbing your teeth with concentrated lemon juice is another situation entirely.

The same rule applies to most other naturally acidic fruit juices including another one of the popularly advertised natural teeth-whitening fruits, strawberries.  Cutting a strawberry in half and rubbing it on your teeth will have the same effect as using concentrated lemon juice and have the same long-term results.  Not only that, strawberries contain tiny seeds which can also scratch your enamel with repeated use allowing the acid from the juice to penetrate further into the enamel and increase the rate of damage.

This brings me to the final area to exercise caution when trying to maintain a perfectly white smile.  Excessive rubbing, brushing, or scouring of the outside of your teeth’ enamel is not recommended.  You will find that most dentists don’t recommend brushing your teeth for any longer than five minutes in one session as the repeated wear on the enamel can wear it down over time.  This also applies to your choice of a toothbrush with most dental hygienists if you listen carefully, recommending not a hard toothbrush but a medium to hard brush and the very stiff bristles of a hard brush can be as damaging as scratching your teeth with minute strawberry seeds over the longer term.