it also helps to soak them in water every time you take them out to eat, if possible. This way you remove any saliva before it dries. Once saliva dries on the aligner it's harder to get off, even if you brush them. Sometimes you can't soak them, but at least try to rinse them in water right away to try to get the saliva off.
Thanks for the updates Barbara! I had my teeth straightened with a combination of invisalign and braces. Have been wearing the retainer day and night for 4 months. Now just starting to wear it only at nights. It's nice to finally have nothing in my mouth during the day and to be able to eat whenever I want to, but I am feeling very anxious that my teeth will shift back. When I put the retainer in at night it feels very tight at first, but by the next morning feels fine. I haven't noticed any movement yet but if I do I will start to do what you're doing and wear the retainer during the day some of the time. FYI, my teeth were straightened with braces and I have a permanent retainer on the back of them, and my orthodontist said if I really want to be sure my teeth don't shift I'll have to wear the retainer at night for the rest of my life. It seems everyone's teeth are different and some can get away with only wearing the retainer a little bit, but I don't want to take any risks! It sounds like in your case you've been able to reduce how much time you wear the retainer for now, which is great. Hopefully you can gradually reduce the time more and eventually wear it only while asleep. The main thing is that you have a nice smile that you can show off when you want to!
That's a great idea with the toothpaste! I also heard of people buying bleaching solutions such as nite white and bleaching their teeth at home using their retainer. You just have to be careful not to put too much bleach in the retainer or it will damage your gums.
My feeling is that whether teeth shift or not is determined more by the specifics of your jaw shape and how much the teeth were corrected in the first place, and not by whether you had invisalign or braces. A lot of people who had braces end up with their teeth moving back too. Just look at how many people writing invisalign reviews say they already had braces when younger! So even if you'd had braces now you might find you needed to wear the retainer basically forever.... At least the retainer doesn't have the horrible attachments that you get with invisalign....
HI Megan,
At least I got there in the end! But it was very annoying to waste so much time and money. I did go back to my dentist for a cleaning a few months ago, but I am definitely thinking of finding another dentist as I don’t feel I can trust him any more. He always did a good job of my general dentistry, but I’m very disappointed in how he handled my Invisalign treatment. He mislead me about how noticeable invisalign is, outright lied about how long the treatment would take, and, most annoyingly, wasted 1 year of my time by making me continue with the first set of aligners even when the treatment had clearly gone off track. It’s partly my fault for not researching Invisalign enough before I started and not being pushy enough when I noticed things going wrong, but I feel when it comes to any doctor-patient relationship the patient should be able to trust that the doctor has their best interests at heart. The priority for my dentist, and I’m sure many other doctors, is to make money. At least I’ve learned from this experience to be less naïve in the future and to do my research before I start any procedure.
Thanks for so much for this wonderful website! It’s really great to be able to vent my frustrations and hopefully to make other people more aware of the possible pitfalls with Invisalign. I wish I’d found this site before I started my treatment and maybe I would have not made so many judgements errors myself!
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