See Quick Results With Professional Teeth Whitening in Warrenton

Doctor Jim Jelinek on the teeth whitening options available

There's a couple different teeth whitening options. Probably the quickest thing, and again, we try to be conservative with patients. We're not going to sell somebody on something that they didn't come for initially 'cause we wouldn't want to have that done ourselves anyway, too. Probably the simplest thing is somebody says, “Hey, I'd like to get my teeth whiter.” We'll talk to them about different options. One option would be whitening strips, just these little plasticy-type strips that you can put on your teeth. If you follow the directions on those, it works. The thing is you kind of have to keep your lips up off of them otherwise, you can move them off with your lips. It does work.

Probably the best thing that works is actual bleaching trays. What that is is we take impressions of the teeth and we fabricate a vinyl, custom made bleaching tray on that model and so, when you put the bleaching solution in it and then you put it into place, and you just leave it in for like, 20 minutes. That works really well 'cause you can talk with those things in and what we usually tell patients, “Hey listen, you can, if you're commuting to work, put that thing in for 20 minutes and do that a couple—on the way to work and come back. That works well.”

We do have an in-office whitening system too, where the patient comes in there, they're here for maybe an hour and half or two hours. If somebody says, needs it done like, now, that's the way to do it. Where is when you go back to bleaching tray, if you've got the time, in about a week or two, you're going to get your teeth as light as you want them during the time. Plus, you've go those trays, you can go—you can use them and every three months or so, you can throw them in for 20 minutes and you're going to bounce it back to the shade you want.

With the in-house whitening, the patient's going to be in a chair, we isolate the teeth, and we put a solution on. We put this intense light on their teeth that activates the bleaching solution and that's how that works. Somebody comes in and says, “Hey, listen, I got a wedding to go to this weekend I need it now.” That's a good solution but the drawback to that is there's a lot more sensitivity associated with that and it's harder to control that. Whereas with bleaching trays, if you get a little sensitive, you just back off a little bit.