Keep Your Smile Beautiful
Finally, after all of your hard work to take care of mouth during treatment, your braces are off, you’ve used your last Invisalign tray, and you have a beautiful straight smile to show for it.
Your healthy smile isn’t the end of your orthodontic treatment, however. To keep your smile shining, You’ll need to wear a retainer to preserve your results.
Retainers control and limit potential changes to the position of your teeth as your gums, bone and muscles adjust to the new placement of your teeth.
Types of Retainers
There are a few different kinds of retainers depending on your needs, and all of them are custom made for your smile.
- Traditional removable retainers include a metal wire that goes around your front teeth and is attached to an acrylic arch that sits on the roof of your mouth. If needed, the metal wires can be adjusted to make minor adjustments to your front teeth.
- Aligner-style retainers look like clear aligners and are a less noticeable alternative to traditional removable retainers.
- Fixed retainers are wires attached to the back of your bottom or top teeth. While you often don’t need to wear a fixed retainer any more than a year after wisdom teeth have been extracted, it is often kept in place for life.
Choosing the Right Retainer
Removable retainers can be taken out for eating and brushing your teeth.
However, they’re easy to lose, so remember to keep yours in the case whenever you remove it.
Fixed retainers are great if you don’t want to keep track of it or worry about wearing it enough.
But when you’re wearing a fixed retainer, you need to give extra attention to removing tartar while flossing.
You’ll need to use a floss threader to clean thoroughly.