Professional Home Teeth Whitening
Last updated 7th October 2021 by Dr Zaeem Jafri
Professional home teeth whitening is the best, safest and most effective way to whiten your teeth for long term results. Home whitening takes around 2-4 weeks, is completely safe for your teeth and the results will last several years.
Most dental practices will have the capacity to do whitening.
Before home whitening
After 3 weeks of home whitening
The process of home teeth whitening
Assessment
Your dentist will make sure your teeth are healthy and suitable for whitening. If you have teeth with large cavities or small cracks, then you may need to have these treated before continuing.
You also need to make sure that there are no visible fillings, crowns, bridges, veneers or composite bonding showing in your smile. If there are then you need to know that whitening will not change the colour of these materials. Any existing dental work will need to be replaced in order to match the new colour of your teeth.
Certain types of discolouration may not be suitable for whitening although whitening is usually the first step, if your dentist thinks you need additional treatment they will let you know.
Scanning and impressions
To make your custom fitting trays, your dentist will take a mould of your teeth. These days many modern dentists have digital scanners that they will use instead of traditional impressions.
Traditional dental impression
Digital scanning
Making your custom fitting trays
Your moulds are then used to make a set of custom fitting whitening trays. These trays make sure your whitening gel can be kept around your teeth safely without spilling out and damaging your soft tissues (gums and cheeks).
If these trays are made in a lab they can take 2 weeks but some clinics may be able to make them faster if they have the equipment to make them in-house.
Wearing the whitening trays
Once your trays have been fitted you can begin whitening your teeth. depending on what gels your dentist has recommended you will be wearing your whitening trays filled with gel overnight or in the day for a period of 2-4 weeks.
Once you are happy with the colour of your teeth, you can stop whitening and save any remaining gels for future top-ups.
You can find detailed instructions on how to use your whitening trays here.
Maintaining the result
To keep your teeth white you don’t need to go through the whole process again. You only need to do some top-up whitening around every 6 months for a couple of nights to maintain the colour.
It really is that easy!