Get The Perfect Wedding Smile In 3 Steps

Every bride wants to look perfect on her wedding day. From the dress to the shoes to the hairstyle, everything needs to be just right. One detail that you especially want to make sure that you get right is the smile. You'll pose for dozens of pictures on your wedding day, and you want to flash a beautiful set of pearly whites every time. If your smile is crooked, dull, and not up to your standards now, don't worry. With a good cosmetic dentist, you can get your teeth in shape in time for the wedding. Take a look at the three steps that you'll need to take to get the smile you want.

One Year Before the Wedding

With a year to go, you have just enough time to get crooked teeth straight before the big day. Invisible braces are the perfect choice for a bride to be, and on average, patients need to wear them for about a year for the best results. Because the clear plastic trays that straighten your teeth are removable, you'll be able to fully participate in taste-testing wedding cakes and other catered menu items – just take the braces out, and you can eat what you want. Plus, the aligners won't show up in your engagement photo and any other pre-wedding photo sessions.

The catch is that you have to wear the plastic trays at least 20 to 22 hours a day for them to be effective. However, if you're dreaming of a wedding dress a few sizes smaller than your current size, this may work out to your benefit. Patients have been known to lose weight while wearing invisible braces, because having to take out the trays, keep track of the time, and brush before putting the trays back in makes extra snacks and eating binges more trouble than they're worth.

A Few Months Before The Wedding

Now that your teeth are straight, or close to it, it's time to lighten that yellow color. Exactly how long before the wedding you need to go in for tooth whitening depends on your ability to stay away from things that will stain your teeth, like coffee, cigarettes, or red wine. Tooth whitening isn't permanent, and the effects can last for as little as a month or as long as a year.

If you're not a smoker and you can live with limiting your consumption of tooth-staining foods and beverages, you can have the whitening done a few months before the wedding, and you won't have to worry about it during those frantic last weeks leading up to the big event. Keep in mind that you'll probably need several treatments to achieve the level of whitening that you're looking for, so plan accordingly.

The Week Before The Wedding

The dentist probably isn't the place that you most want to visit in the last few days before the wedding, but this is an important finishing touch to make sure that you have a sparkling smile on your wedding day. Make an appointment for a cleaning, scale, and polish, as close to the day of the wedding as you reasonably can.

The good news is that if you've been taking care of your teeth all year, this should be a quick visit. Your dentist will clean your teeth, removing plaque and tartar with ultrasonic equipment. Next your teeth will be scaled. This is when your dentist uses smaller hand tools to remove small, stubborn pieces of tarter. Finally, the dentist will use a small tool with a spinning rubber cup on the end and a gritty paste to smooth and polish your teeth until they shine.

The last thing you want is to hold back your smile on your wedding day because you're embarrassed by your teeth. By following these steps, you'll be able to flash your biggest and brightest smile with confidence on the biggest day of your life.