If you had braces as a teen, you know that wearing your retainers is quite possibly the most annoying thing EVER. They're tight, they make you talk funny, they're not attractive, and they're incredibly hard to keep in your mouth throughout the night (or am I the only human who, unbeknownst to me, would take them out in the middle of the night and throw them across the room?).
I tried to wear mine diligently, I really did — especially since my parents had just spent $3,000 dollars on metal contraptions that expanded my palette, widened my bite, and straightened my teeth — but it didn't end up working out for me. I stopped wearing them after a year or so and my lower teeth shifted. Eh, who cares that they're crooked? Well, apparently my gums cared.
Cut to 15 years later at my most recent dental appointment: "You're going to have to get braces or else you're going to have to get gum grafts," Michael Apa, D.D.S., a cosmetic dentist at the Rosenthal Apa Group in NYC told me. What?! "Your teeth are shifting and they're pulling away from your gums, so you either have to straighten out your teeth and return them to their proper placement or get gum surgery." I already had one gum graft (where your dentist scrapes the roof of your mouth and attaches the skin to your gumline to prevent it from receding) in high school and it was no fun. I didn't even get a lollipop when it was over. Rude.
I started to feel really pissed at my childhood orthodontist. Why couldn't he have just given me the permanent retainer that fuses to the back of your teeth? I could have avoided all of this! "A lot of times you have to ask for the bonded wire," Jennifer Salzer, D.D.S., an orthodontist in NYC told me. "It's not the automatic option. The thing with teeth is that they will always revert back to their normal state if you don't maintain their positioning. I offer my patients the hidden wire retainer all of the time — that way they don't have any issues that crooked teeth can bring on in the future, like TMJ problems, headaches, gum recession, underbites, and eventually having your teeth wear down and crack if they don't line up properly."
But since I didn't have Dr. Salzer as my rockstar orthodontist as a teen, I was stuck with a removeable retainer that I never wore and crooked teeth, so I had to discuss my options with Dr. Apa. After he reassured me that I'm not the only person that this kind of scenario happens to, I felt a little better. "I've actually seen a lot of 18- to 21-year-olds, and even women who are older, opt for adult braces, because they had them when they were younger and didn't wear their retainers. But now they want to fix whatever teeth issues they have now before they head off to college or before they interview for jobs post-college."
Sound familiar? If so, here are the teeth-straightening options that Dr. Apa told me are out there that hopefully you can benefit from too:
1. Regular metal braces, like the ones Faith Hill is wearing above-slash-similar to the ones you wore in middle school. These range in price from $3000 to $5000.
2. Incognito Lingual braces, which look like metal braces, but they line the back of your teeth so they're not visible. You can expect the cost of these to be around the same price as regular braces.
3. Invisalign, clear trays that slip over your teeth and attach to little nubs that help move them over a period of time. With each new tray that you get every two week, your teeth shift a tiny bit and eventually straighten out. This process costs anywhere from $3000 to $6500 total, depending on the movement of your teeth. (I chose this route in case you were wondering.)
4. Veneers, which are porcelain caps that are bound to your teeth and can help bridge gaps, straighten out the look of crooked teeth, help build out smaller teeth, and give you a whiter smile. This is obviously the most expensive option, ranging from $500 to $3,500, per tooth, but sometimes it's necessary. Take Dr. Apa's patient Lauren Platt (below) for example.
Since I've only just begun my Invisalign journey — and so far it's going well — I decided to call Lauren up to get the full scoop on her experience with braces, both times she's had them.
Lauren got metal braces when she was 15 because she had buck teeth, but she also had another issue: peg laterals, a congenital tooth malformation that causes teeth to grow in smaller than they normally do. So while her teeth were somewhat straight when her first round of braces ended, she still needed a little more assistance — and she wanted this transformation to happen before she went to college. "I really didn't get teased in high school about my teeth, but I was worried about going to LA to school and have the first thing that people noticed about me to be my smile," Platt said. "I wanted to make a good first impression and make new friends and meet new people with confidence."
So at 18, Lauren visited Dr. Apa and also worked with Dr. Salzer to fix her situation. Dr. Salzer had already inserted a palette expander on Lauren to widen her mouth when she had braces the first time, so while her bite lined up and her teeth were pretty straight, she still had to deal with her peg laterals that would never result in a full smile. Dr. Apa knew she needed veneers along with another round of adult braces.
Dr. Apa started Lauren's process by applying veneers that ceramist and oral designer Jason Kim created specifically for her. Then, Dr. Apa gently roughed up the surface of her four front teeth and then bonded on her tailor-made, non-Chiclet-looking veneers to create a fuller smile. But the fun wasn't over yet.Dr. Salzer then got Lauren started on an Invisalign program, which pulled her veneer-topped teeth and the rest of her smile into place over a course of the next year.
Finally, here's Lauren's after shot:
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