What Causes Teeth to Discolour

Hi, it’s Dr Michael Ghobrial here from Sure Dental. 

I was with our new patient Grace from Kedron yesterday. She is after professional in-chair teeth whitening to upgrade her smile. During our consultation, she asked me, Michael, it feels like my teeth’s colour has been changing over the years, why is that?

This is quite a common question. One of the things a lot of patients want to know is what causes their teeth to discolour, and why do their teeth change colour with time. So I thought I’d record this video for you to give you a bit of an idea as to what causes teeth to actually discolour. 

Now, when considering tooth discolouration, we consider either intrinsic staining or internal staining, and extrinsic staining or external staining.

When we are considering internal staining, that can be due to developmental issues, it can be due to certain antibiotics taken as a child that affects the way the teeth have developed, and you get these grey stripes on the teeth. But it can also be due to trauma. So a knock on the tooth, the tooth can then gradually darken, or it can be due to a root canal treatment, particularly some of the older modes of root canal treatment, which used to stain the teeth as well.

But then you’ve got external staining. It is caused by life. It’s caused by what we eat and drink. It’s the stains in food, the stains in wine, in coffee and tea, some mouthwashes. And so these are extrinsic staining. 

When we consider how to lighten teeth, we have to consider whether the staining is primarily due to intrinsic issues or extrinsic issues. With extrinsic issues, things like polishing teeth, at-home tooth whitening, in office whitening all work really, really well. Whereas with internal staining or internal discolouration, things become a little bit more difficult because we need to colour the tooth from the inside.

And sometimes that’s possible in the case of root canal treatment, where you can do internal whitening. Sometimes it’s possible to get a decent result when it comes to antibiotic staining. But sometimes not a lot can be done to improve the colour, and that’s when we need to consider putting a facing over the tooth to improve the colour of those. 

So these are some of  the main causes for teeth discolouration. If you’ve ever been curious about the colour of your teeth, and you are considering brightening your smile, why don’t you contact us through suredental.com.au, via our social media or give us a call on 07 3113 9698, and our friendly team will help you organise your consultation. I hope you found this video useful, and I’ll see you at the next one.