Travis Gets Whiter (Teeth)

posted at 11:01 am
on Nov. 10, 2002

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Look closely today at your screen.  Is it bright white? White? Bone? Off-white? Yellow-y?  Postit Note-ish?

Well, I just started using Crest Whitestrips, and damned if I can tell the difference anymore.

I have no idea why the whole world has collectively woken up one morning, looked in the mirror, and noticed, hey, my (collective) teeth don’t reflect 100% of the ambient light in this room!  What’s up with that?

But for whatever reason, the thing to do these days seems to be bleach the heck out of the old cuspids.  So who am I to buck trends?

I went looking at the grocery store / pharmacy for Whitestrips.  I saw lots of toothpastes dedicated to whitening, some whitening gum, whitening paste in a dropper bottle and whitening mouthwash, but no Whitestrips.

They had removed the boxes from the shelves and put them behind the counter, like they used to do with condoms and adult magazines.  What was I getting into?

The box is large, square and blue, with a burst of light on the front that reminds me of the halos around street lamps in a foggy night back when street lamps were white, not orange-y—hey, maybe they need to bleach those as well!

There are 56 strips in a box: 28 for upper teeth, 28 for lower teeth.  You do it twice a day for 30 minutes—more on that later.  That means it’s a two-week process.

The box says your can use them any time, while “commuting,” “showering/dressing,” “reading/watching TV” (aren’t those mutually exclusive?) “housework[ing]” or “surfing the Net.” Which is how I chose to use them, of course.

I have them on right now.  Can you tell?

They remind me of bubble wrap, if the bubbles in bubble wrap were really really small, and instead of being filled with air, they were filled with a clear gel slightly thicker than egg whites, and instead of being self-contained, they were open on one side, so the gel could be squished out against some surface, like, say, one’s teeth.

The strips come in two different shapes, and they only cover your front teeth, so your back teeth have to stay icky.  Not a problem, unless you have a really big mouth, and I’ll leave the obvious joke to you.

Basically, you peel this strip of gel-covered bubble plastic from an applicator, cling-wrap it to your teeth, and then say not a word for 30 minutes.  it’s painless, boring, and impossible to tell if it’s working.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that from the bathroom to the bedroom to the kitchen to the computer room, every single room in my house has a mirror and a slightly different quality of light.  So far, it seems like it’s had very little effect, though my top middle teeth do seem a little more see-through—I hope that’s a good thing.

I’ll let you know how it goes 14 days from now…

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