Dentist supervised teeth whitening


The teeth whitening procedures provided by professional dentist usually employ hydrogen peroxide, which is applied at the dental office or at home. In general the whitening systems that are used in dental offices have higher concentration of peroxide gel, which varies between 15% and 30% and is determined by the dentist for each particular patient. Because of the higher concentrated hydrogen peroxide gel, the patient undergoing teeth whitening procedure needs protection for its gums, which is applied by the dentist (the gum protection can be a protection gel or rubber shield). After your gums are protected, the dentist applies the whitening paste on your teeth and then cleans the teeth after several minutes. Depending on the patient teeth, this procedure can be applied multiple times during a single visit.

Sometimes the dentist will recommend a follow-up at home teeth whitening procedure, to improve the results of the in-office whitening. This procedure uses peroxide gel with lower concentration between 10% and 20%, which is applied to a custom-fitted mouth tray prepared for each patient. The patient has to wear the mouth tray with the whitening gel for a few hours a day (the dentist determines for how long exactly to wear the tray).

The advantages of performing dentist supervised whitening is that, the dentist can determine what type of treatment the patient needs (in-office or at-home), the concentration of peroxide in the whitening gel and also that the in-office tooth bleaching is supervised by professional. The disadvantage of the in-office whitening is that cost considerably more compared to over-the-counter whitening kits.