New Patients: (201) 266-5726
Existing Patients: (201) 773-3992
Achieving a beautiful, well-aligned and functional smile is the ultimate reward for having committed yourself to the effort, time, and investment of orthodontic care. Now that you’ve completed the hard part; it’s time to focus on maintaining your new and winning smile!
Almost every individual who has undergone orthodontic treatment will need to wear some form of retention. As an essential component of care, retainers are not designed to move or correct your teeth but rather serve to prevent the teeth from relapsing or shifting and becoming crooked again.
Remember, the benefits of orthodontic care can last a lifetime. By wearing retainers as prescribed, you can keep your teeth as straight and beautiful as the day you completed treatment.
Once you’ve completed the active phase of treatment, you’ll be given clear retainers to stabilize and preserve your newly aligned smile. Your retainers are custom designed and individually fabricated to perfectly fit and maintain your case.
Just like your treatment aligners, your custom retainers are made of the highest grade of BPA-free, biologically safe, durable, and transparent plastic materials. Typically, these retainers will last up to two years. However, since they are worn for greater lengths of time as compared to a treatment aligner, they can become stretched and damaged. Furthermore, oral habits like clenching and grinding or not wearing your retainers consistently as prescribed and then forcing them back into place can also stretch and damage them.
Our office recommends Vivera®. In addition to being fabricated by the same team that makes Invisalign® aligners, these retainers come in sets of four. In this way, you can try on a new retainer every 6 months to determine if your current one has stretched, and it’s time to use the new one to continue maintaining the alignment of your smile.
If you have one set of retainers or you’re down to your last set of retainers, we can always upgrade you from a single set or more spare sets by scanning for Vivera. While we have your original scan on file to make your spare or backup retainers, some situations require a new scan. If the teeth have shifted, or you have had dental work that affects the retainer’s fit, we may need to take a new scan, and custom fabricate retainers to the new specifications of your smile.
Besides wearing your retainers as prescribed, it’s also essential to keep them clean on a daily and long-term basis. To break up and eliminate food debris, you can wash your retainers under a gentle stream of lukewarm water. You can also use the Invisalign cleaning tub and solution as instructed for your treatment aligners.
We also invite you to bring your retainers in for a cleaning at your routine dental checkup and hygiene visits.
Our goal is to help every patient experience the benefits of good oral health and a beautiful smile. We value the trust you have placed in our office and strive to provide solutions that meet your dental needs and expectations of care.
