After your teeth have been shifted by braces or aligners by your dentist, they will craft you a retainer. These are plastic oral devices that fit snugly over your teeth. Once you receive a retainer, it is crucial to wear it as much as possible. You should be wearing it every night while you sleep. That’s about eight hours every 24 hours that your retainer is in your mouth. That’s a lot of time in your mouth, so how often should you replace your retainer?
Your teeth are quite active at night in ways you may not know. If you don’t wear a retainer, your teeth will try and shift back to their natural position. This is called elastic memory, and it will occur no matter how long its been since you had your braces or aligners removed. It could be three weeks, three months, or three years, if you leave your teeth unprotected, they will shift, erasing that perfect smile and wasting all that money.
It’s important to wear a retainer every night so your teeth don’t begin to microshift. Besides your teeth trying to shift when you don’t wear a retainer, you may actually grind your teeth while you sleep or clench your jaw. This happens all the time, and people don’t realize that they do it. If you wake up routinely with morning headaches, a sore jaw, or have sensitivity to cold or hot foods, that may be a sign that you are grinding your teeth while you sleep. When you do grind your teeth, that will damage your retainer, potentially grinding through it or making it more prone to cracking.
Bacteria have a big role in retainer lifespans, too. You’ll need to clean your retainer daily to keep the natural bacteria from your mouth from growing onto the retainer. Deep cleaning your retainer once a week or a month will also go a long way in keeping it strong. If your retainer gets too much bacteria on it you’ll start to see yellow or white spots. Wearing your retainer when it has these spots on it can make you sick, and it can make the retainer material weak and brittle.
As you now know, retainers go through an awful lot of daily wear and tear. It is recommended that you replace your retainer once every 1-2 years. Most people opt to replace it annually because it is very rare that your retainer will make it 24 months without bacteria growing on it due to the nature of your saliva. Many people often keep a backup set of retainers on hand too, because they tend to lose their retainers, crack them, or the dog chews them up. Having a replacement set of retainers is the best plan when you lose yours or when they become too gross.
Replace your lost, cracked, gross, and damaged dental retainers with a new one from SportingSmiles. Prevent your teeth from shifting using the most durable clear retainers available. Take your own impression at home and save hundreds over going to the dentist. Impression kit included.
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You can go to your dentist to have a replacement set crafted, but that would require taking time out of your busy schedule and going to the office in person. Your dentist may want to do X-rays, require insurance, or charge new patient fees. The worst of all is the huge bill associated with retainers. If you live in a big city like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, your retainer replacement bill may be upward of $1,000. Even if you live in a small rural area, dentists can charge around $500. That’s a lot of money to spend, potentially each year on a new set.
SportingSmiles is the No. 1 online retainer company in America. There are no in-person visits, and the entire process is done from the comfort of your home. These are the same high-quality premium retainers you’d receive from the dentist but much more affordable. With SportingSmiles, you can receive replacement retainers in numerous ways. You can use the patented impression kit, take impressions of your teeth and then send them back to the SportingSmiles lab, where your retainer will be crafted. If you have a dentist, you may ask them for your physical molds or a digital STL File of your teeth. SportingSmiles can use either of these to craft your retainers.
With the nature of retainers needing to be replaced annually, SportingSmiles does offer a retainer subscription service so you can have a fresh set of retainers delivered directly to your door every six months. This is a great way to make sure that your retainers are tight and fresh to prevent your teeth from shifting because you now know that you should replace your retainer once a year!
