What is Invisalign®?
Serial Dental Aligners: Invisalign® is one of the brands that started it all. This is a type of orthodontics that allows us to move your teeth without the need for brackets cemented on your teeth: the train tracks, the metal mouth, as the teenagers call it. The idea that we can do dental movements, movements of our teeth, make them look nicer, get the bite better, and fix the smile by moving the teeth and not interrupting the surfaces of the teeth or etching the surfaces of the teeth or grinding the surfaces of the teeth- doing all of this in a non-restorative way. Simply moving our teeth to make them look beautiful. Whereas, in the past, we would use these cemented brackets, these metal braces, and glue them to the front surface of the tooth and then put a bar or some type of wire and rubber bands to connect and allow them to follow this kind of track, if you will, moving our teeth together.
Nowadays, we have digital technologies that have really made these clear serial aligners/ staged aligners more successful and pervasive in society. You’ve heard of all kinds of brands nowadays. ClearCorrect® is a brand, and we’ve heard of these brands. They’re coming online daily almost. The reason that they’re so popular is because digital technology can really make a major impact in all of our lives.
3D Printed Aligners
3D printed aligners, where we’re literally printing these devices that can snap into your mouth, and you can smile, not even see that they’re there, and over time move your teeth into the right position. Some of the benefits of these aligners we’re seeing now and even the newer technologies coming out from these companies are new material aligners. So we’re 3D printing these aligners, and we have these materials that are more resilient or less resilient, stiffer or softer, have less give or more give, and have more memory or less memory. All of these different components of these clear materials allow your teeth to move faster and better hurt less, have a better impact, and basically deliver the type of solution that you want, which is a beautiful smile in a complete way, as quickly as possible. That’s really what’s being engineered now.
Whether the brand name is Invisalign®, ClearCorrect®, or something else, this concept of clear dental aligner technology is the clear retainers. Some other terms that you may have heard are the snap-ins for these- but the idea here is that this is an incredible technology and in the right hands with the right guidance from the dentists at Concierge Dental Group, you’ll be on the right track to getting your smile back, whether or not you’re a teenager that needs to move your teeth or for the most part, in our practices, adult orthodontics, clear aligners are really the way to go. It doesn’t affect your life in a significant way. You can pop them on and off. You can take them out for your meetings or dates or dinners with family and friends, and you can make a huge impact in your smile with just these new dental technology of clear aligners.