Invisilign are touted as an alternative to braces and marketed to mature adults who want to straighten their teeth but are not keen on wearing obvious metal or clear bracket braces in their mouth. The Invisilign treatment consists of a series of aligners that you switch out about every two months. Your dentist or orthodontist devises the alignment plan that they feel will work best for you and the aligners are then custom ordered and made for your teeth from taking impression molds. Each Invisilign aligner that you go through is supposed to shift your teeth gradually towards their final destination straight position. You change to a new aligner every few months. Switching to a new aligner is akin to having metal braces tightened in the sense that teeth are asked to shift again towards a form which is that much closer to the desired perfect result. The last aligner represents the final desired position and after that you normally get a retainer made to wear in the evenings that help maintain the result.
Adult Teeth Straightening
The claim of Invisalign is that you can transform your smile without any interference with your day to day life and the natural look of your mouth. This is particularly attractive to mature adults, who aren’t jumping for joy over the idea of digressing back to the metal orthodontia that their children (and grand children) sport. The Invisilign concept is particularly alluring to adults who for whatever reason, were denied braces by parents who couldn’t or didn’t want to pay for them at the time they were children. Maybe they went through life with somewhat crooked teeth. Now that they are mature adults, some people decide, hey I should have had braces but since I didn’t … let me spend five grand on these novel clear Invisilign and get the straight teeth beautiful smile I always wanted.
Supposedly, there are millions of dazzling smiles that back up the claim that invisalign works to fix over crowded teeth, widely spaced teeth and cross bite (when the upper and lower jaws are misaligned) overbite and under-bite problems. They claim to give you a virtually-invisible option for getting the dazzling smile that you want. Inivislign costs roughly the same amount of money as braces and the treatment claims to takes roughly the same amount of time as regular braces too (though I personally think they work slower and less effectively than metal braces). The supposed advantage of Invisilign over braces is that you can remove the aligners for cleaning (unlike braces) and that you cannot really see the aligners (no metal mouth of braces).
I personally do not like Invisilign (I hate them!)
I do not recommend Invisilign for adults or anyone for that matter. Most dentists/orthodontics will sell it to you to the tune of $5,000 ballpark price depending on where you live, but that’s definitely not to say that Invisilign is a good thing! I think Inivislign are horrible, don’t work well, give results inferior to metal braces, are an ineffective use of money, and are borderline unsanitary to boot! Do I sound opinionated (Yes, I do)! I don’t like Invisalign one bit as I think they work somewhat, yet not anywhere near as effectively as real metal braces and I am perfectly entitled to hold this opinion.
Inivislign are not Invisible!
Let me talk a little about why I think that Inivislign is useless. First of all, they claim to be totally invisible but really quite frankly they are not invisible. They are rather bulky looking clear things actually. If you are talking to someone up fairly close in conversation you can definitely see them. Not only that, they are plastic coverings and if the person next to you can’t quite see them, let me say that you can probably hear them and feel them too. The aligners affect the way you talk and cause a very subtle alteration in speech akin to what you would have if you were wearing a retainer and talking. Your tongue and mouth movements are affected by having plastic over your teeth. Not only that, when you take these clod hopper clear plastic aligners out of your mouth to eat something – you can definitely see them coming out, see them dirty with food, and further more smell them stinky after them having been in your mouth. When they get removed out of your mouth and put into a retainer container at the lunch or dinner table, trust me, they are the farthest thing from invisible. They are totally gross!
I deem Inivislign unsanitary!
I think invisilign are rather unsanitary to boot. Even though you change aligners every few months, mark my words, it’s months. Do you know all the food including onion and garlic you might consume in a single month? The retainers are really pretty porous and while they start out as clear, then end up as murky bordering on filthy after a month of wearing them. They really get scummy from food particles. That means you may need to brush you teeth before popping your retainers in after eating. That is rather inconvenient. You can get bad breath even if you brush consistently, and trust me that the bad breath will glue itself onto those aligners like no tomorrow. Food scum will also color the aligner from pristine clear to icky murky.
You’ll want to throw that aligner away weeks before its time is up I promise. Most likely, a cleaning fetish will ensue with your largely futile attempt to keep the aligners clean, fresh and sanitary. Prepare to be scrubbing the retainer with everything from a toothbrush to a bristle brush. You’ll be letting them soak in mouthwash for hours to try to get the smell clean. Once you realize mouthwash costs to much, you will move to generic or effervescent denture cleaning tablets and water. Family members will be totally grossed out by your aligner sitting in dirty denture fizzing water cups all around the house.
I claim Inivislign aligners ineffective for final fine tuning of teeth
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that nothing straightens teeth like metal braces. Though even metal brackets and wires can break, they are strong. And because each bracket is bonded to your teeth, the tightening and torque techniques the orthodontist uses on the wires can really crane around even the most stubborn of twisted and snaggled up teeth. Teeth can be pivoted. With the clear Invisilign the plastic is less effective in fine tune maneuvers. This is particularly true at the final stages when they really try to get the teeth perfectly straight and some orthodontists even do some over torque tricks to get teeth looking more straight up and down when they have strange shapes and sizes. Sometimes one pesky rogue tooth may need to be over turned slightly to make it look straighter if it has some unique bulge or characteristic to the tooth that needs inventive tweaking. You can get the fine and unique customization in with braces and wires but not with the Invisilign.
I know people that have gone all through the Invisilign procedure for a year and a half and then be unhappy with the result and have to pay for braces from scratch after just having had Invisilign! Adults tend to be picky and so the very most effective method should be used to get as perfect result as possible. Invisilign won’t give you the very best method or latitude for special tweaking of the final end result in my opinion. I would not risk spending double the time and double the money messing around with Invisilign aligners. I would go for the tried and true old school metal braces. Let your husband or boyfriend fantasize that you are a teenager if need be, or just tell them to suffer silently while you wear metal in your mouth and get the job done. Make sure to go to a good orthodontist too.