When is the best time to wear your bleaching trays, daytime or night?
When should you perform your tray-based tooth whitening treatments?
If you were to read the instructions of all of the various brands of bleaching gels that are intended for use with at-home tray-based tooth whitening technique you would find that some manufacturers recommend using their product primarily at night, others primarily during the day.
Knowing this you might ask, which is the best? Well, from the standpoint of your teeth we can tell you it really doesn't matter. You can get excellent whitening results using either approach, as long as you stay within the confines of your tooth whitening product's application times.
There are advantages to performing your whitening treatments at night.
There can be advantages to performing your tray-based tooth bleaching treatments at night. For one, when a person sleeps the amount of saliva that they produce diminishes. This means that if you choose to bleach your teeth while you sleep you will have the benefit that there will be less dilution effect on the whitener and therefore it will be more effective.
Another advantage of whitening as you sleep is that each of your whitening treatments is likely to be longer and uninterrupted. This is in comparison to treatments performed during the day that often must compete with the duties of life and therefore be abbreviated.
In general, whitening your teeth as you sleep typically produces the greatest "bang for the buck." This is because each whitener application will be allowed to remain in the tray to exhaustion. Daytime whitening sessions, in comparison, may be cut short before the full usefulness of the whitener application has been reached. This means that in comparison more product must be used to reach the same whitening end point.
The best treatment time may depend on the characteristics of the tooth whitener you are using.
When making a recommendation about suitable treatment approaches for their products, each manufacturer will take into consideration characteristics associated with their whitener's formulation. Statistically speaking, some of the whitening gels created for used with tray-based technique have been shown to be active for up to four hours after being placed into the user's mouth. Whitening gels having this characteristic would, therefore, be very suited with a relatively longer application time, such as an over-night treatment. Shorter-acting gels would be more suited to shorter, waking-hours treatments where life often dictates that treatment times are less lengthy.
In all cases you must read the directions that come with the whitener you will be using.
The appropriate usage of a whitening gel is dependent upon its composition, especially the type of active ingredient that it contains and the concentration of this compound. Non-compliance with a whitener's instructions can lead to the end-user experiencing significant complications with side effects.
