My Invisilign Experience
I keep running my tongue across my top teeth in my mouth, amazed at how smooth and straight they are. For the past 10 months, I have had little hard tooth-colored nubs—or “attachments” if you want to get technical—bonded to my teeth, in order to straighten them. But today, I finally got them removed and have been left with near-perfect teeth.
I started Invisalign in April of 2014. My older sister had gone through the process of Invisalign too before me; she had Invisalign for one month less. For anyone that doesn’t know, Invisalign is basically like clear braces. Again: clear, not invisible. However, most people didn’t even notice I had it unless they had it too, or I had my trays in (which you’re supposed to have in all the time, except when eating, but I admittedly left out for a couple hours here and there). In fact, one of my former bosses didn’t even notice I had Invisalign until December.
Basically with Invisalign, you get started with two clear trays that look like plastic retainers. I was thinking, “Cool, you can’t see these at all. I don’t have to get the nubs like my sister did,” Wrong. After two weeks with those trays/retainers, I went back in for my appointment and got my “attachments”/buttons/nubs put on. These are basically tooth-colored dots on your teeth that the trays lock on to and press against so your teeth can move. I’m sure there’s more science behind it, but that’s what I understood it as.
When you have the trays out, you can barely tell that the attachments are there, but when the trays are in, a little shadow is made and you can tell that something is there. You can look through my Instagram selfies (I had Invisalign in all of them until March) and see how the attachments look.
(Note: in my Instagram pictures, I always had the plastic trays out, so you can see how not visible the attachments are on my teeth, unless you look closely.)
Anyway, every month you receive two sets of the clear trays. You wear one set for two weeks then the other set for two weeks. The trays can feel a little tight the first couple days, but they loosen up as your teeth move. There wasn’t any pain for me that some Aleve couldn’t fix. So whatever, you wear the different sets of trays for however long, and boom—you get the attachments removed, get your teeth polished, take impressions for your retainers that you wear at night, and you have perfect, straight, beautiful teeth.
For me, I had a little gold wire bonded to the back of my bottom teeth and only got a retainer for my top teeth. It isn’t necessary, but my dentist explained to me that sometimes the teeth can shift, so this helps keep them in place. However, if I really end up hating the wire—which I’ve had it on for less than 12 hours and have already ignored it—I can get it removed in a year and get a removable retainer that I wear at night if I want.
I don’t really know if you’re supposed to whiten your teeth right away when you get the attachments off, but I have whitening trays in as I’m writing this and my teeth feel fine. I’ll let you guys know if my teeth fall out or something crazy like that happens.
Overall, I would recommend Invisalign to anyone. I never had braces because I always thought they looked weird and I never wanted them, but I wanted straight teeth. The only downfall is sometimes it’s hard to eat rough things, like stale bread, but who wants to eat stale bread anyway? Straight teeth, a bright smile, and just the mere fact that I didn’t have to have a metal contraption in my mouth outweighs any possible downfall.
So that’s the update on my teeth. If you have any questions, tweet me, Instagram me, email me, comment below—whatever you would like.
