I had some dental bonding done on a couple of chips several years ago and they are really starting to stain. I’ve been told that teeth whitening does not work on dental bonding. My question is, while I know it can’t make it whiter than it was, can it get the bonding back to its original color? If not, will a whitening toothpaste help?
Mandy
Dear Mandy,
Tooth bleaching trays
I am glad you wrote. Unfortunately, teeth whitening will not have a positive impact on your dental bonding. In fact, it doesn’t work on any dental work. If you did whiten your teeth what would happen is your natural tooth color would get whiter, but the dental bonding would stay the same color. This would actually make your smile look worse than it does now because it would increase the difference in color for your teeth.
Most whitening toothpastes contain abrasives that will actually damage both your dental bonding and the enamel on your teeth. It will scrape off surface stains, but then there are are micro scratches on the surface of your teeth that will cause them to pick up stains even faster. These do more harm than good. There is only one brand of whitening toothpaste that I recommend — Supersmile Toothpaste. It won’t whiten the bonding, but it won’t harm either your bonding or your teeth. It can remove some surface stains from both.
The ideal thing to do is have this bonding replaced. If you are not in a financial position to afford replacing it, you could see if your dentist can polish it up a bit. This will depend on the type of fillers your dentist used on the surface part of the bonding. They would have needed to use microfills. An expert cosmetic dentist would have done this. However, some dentists who do not do a lot of cosmetic work will only carry general purpose fillers and those are not going to give you the high polish you’ll need to get them looking better.
When you are ready to replace them, you can whiten your teeth ahead of time and then have the new bonding made to match the whiter shade of your teeth. However, you will want to wait a week after in order to give the color time to settle.
This blog is brought to you by Portage, MI Dentist Dr. Susan Dennis.