I was wondering if it is safe to whiten your teeth with Clorox Bleach. If so, do you gargle with it or apply it with a Q-tip?
Sandy
Dear Sandy,
While there will always be people who try this, I’m not going to recommend it because of some danger involved. Believe it or not, bleach is used in some dental procedures, but it is not what we use for teeth whitening, and for good reasons.
It is used in root canal treatments. In dental school we are taught to use it to dissolve the dead organic material inside a cleaned-out root as well as to disinfect the tooth. Notice it dissolves organic material. That’s not what you want to happen to the tissue inside your mouth.
Bleach is a base, which is very corrosive. Think in terms of lye. I’m sure you’ve seen some crime shows where a dead body was dissolved in lye so as not to be discovered. Today, mortuaries are considering using lye to get rid of unclaimed bodies.
Another issue is if it happens to come in contact with certain other chemicals (and everything in our world is made up of one type of chemical or another) it can turn into a toxic gas. You can’t escape your mouth if that happens the way you could leave a home that is filling with gas.
On the less serious side, the bottles of bleach do say not to use in a way other than designated under penalty of law. If you’ve already been caught tearing the tag off your mattress, you’ll now have two strikes.
The Safest Way to Whiten Your Teeth
If you truly want teeth whitening done both effectively and safely, then it is best to do it with a dentist. Professional teeth whitening helps prevent some of the complications that come up with patients who do it on their own with over-the-counter whitening strips.
You’ll also get whiter teeth much faster. The whitening gel that your dentist uses is significantly stronger than anything you would get over-the-counter. So, you would have to purchase many, many boxes of whitening strips to get the level of whitening you’d get through your dentist.
This blog is brought to you by Decatur, AL Dentists Drs. Drake and Wallace.