Getting braces can be embarrassing, especially during your tween and teen years. It’s common for many people to choose to go with the clear or ceramic bracket option to make your braces less noticeable, but you may have concerns about your brackets turning yellow over time. Let’s break things down and talk about avoiding this potential problem.
How it Happens
Brackets turn yellow when they’re stained from food, drink or bacteria. When we get braces, we’re used to eating and drinking whatever we like without giving it a second thought. However, just like our teeth can turn yellow and get stained from what we put in our mouths, our braces and brackets do the same thing. The only difference is you can’t whiten your brackets with a whitening strip like you can with your actual teeth.
Avoiding the Stain
To avoid the stain, you have to make sure you’re paying attention to three different things – what you eat, what you drink, and how well you take care of your teeth. Taking extra care of these three things will help you avoid a yellow mess.
What You Eat
Avoiding anything with artificial colors in it is a must. Although your favorite candy tastes great, the dye in those skittles can have a nasty effect on the color of your brackets. Even something as simple as eating red tomato sauce can lead to pigment leaking into the material of the elastic bands and brackets. You’ll want to avoid anything with dark pigmentation to avoid staining.
What You Drink
You’re used to having a glass of red wine at night to decompress after work, or a morning cup of coffee to wake you up. Be careful about consuming these highly pigmented drinks, alongside soda and juices, if you want your brackets to stay completely seamless against your teeth. These highly pigmented drinks can discolor your ceramic or clear brackets faster than you can drink them.
Oral Hygiene
This may seem like an obvious one, but it’s important to brush your teeth at least twice a day every. You should be flossing every day or in between meals and snacks. The more often you brush and take care of your teeth after eating, the less time the pigment from your food will sit on your braces. If you don’t have access to a toothbrush or floss right after eating, rinse your mouth with some water.
By monitoring your oral hygiene and eating well, you’ll have no problem with your clear braces.
If you have more questions about how to avoid staining in your braces, ask Drs. Savage, Sabol and Visser at your one-on-one appointment. They’ll be able to go over everything with you in further detail during your appointment.
