Hi, it’s Michael Ghobrial here from Sure Dental at Wavell Heights here in Brisbane. I met a new patient, Melissa, the other day who lives in Ascot, and she came in to talk about whitening her teeth.

She had professional tooth whitening previously, and she wanted to know whether laser whitening with us would give her a better result, because she wasn’t happy with the results of the whitening. And it got me thinking of the question of, well, where do I go? What do I do if professional tooth whitening hasn’t given me the result that I’m looking for? And so today I thought I would share with you a couple of different options when it comes to how to get the colour that you would like for your teeth even after tooth whitening has not worked.

One of the reasons tooth whitening doesn’t respond is sometimes some people have a grey based discolouration of their teeth or antibiotic staining. They had the antibiotics as children, particularly Tetracycline, and that leaves these darker bands on the teeth. And your normal, even professional tooth whitening doesn’t always give a great result.

One of our first steps, when we see these patients here at Sure Dental, is we’ll try to use our laser whitening, which uses a very different technology and can sometimes get a result when other whitening procedures don’t work. 

It gives us the opportunity to lighten the teeth as far as they possibly can go with whitening. And then we reassess the situation. But sometimes even after whitening, whether it’s due to Tetracycline staining that’s really deep, or whether it’s cracks or old fillings that are stained on the front teeth, the whitening will only get teeth to a certain point. 

And you still have these dark lines as Melissa did. And the conversation I had with her was actually tooth whitening is only going to have a limited improvement for you.

In actual fact, what we need to do is put a facing over the tooth that is the colour that you would like to land on. And that is what we call veneers. And often we’ll do these veneers, either in porcelain, if we want a really long-lasting stable solution, or in resin veneers or resin bonding, if we want a good medium-term solution for the tooth whitening as well.

Other times, as I said, everything else in the tooth whitens, except for the old filling, And sometimes it’s just a matter of replacing the fillings on the front teeth after whitening.

So if you’ve been unhappy with the colour of your teeth for a little while, if you’ve tried tooth whitening, and it hasn’t given you the result you want, why don’t you direct message us on suredental.com.au or give us a call on 07 3256 9111 and we can assess your smile and let you know if there are any options to improve things. See you in the next video.

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