Straighter teeth without a mouth full of metal

You wear a series of clear plastic aligners, each one shaped slightly differently from the last. Every set moves your teeth a small, controlled amount, and you change to the next set roughly every one to two weeks.

The aligners are made from digital scans of your teeth, so the whole sequence is planned before you start. That means we can show you a projection of the finished result at the beginning.

They come out for eating, drinking anything other than water, brushing, and flossing. Everything else, they stay in, which needs to be about 20 to 22 hours a day for the plan to work.

Invisalign handles crowding, gaps, and many bite problems well. It is particularly good for adults who had braces as a teenager and have seen their teeth drift back over the years.

Severe bite issues or teeth that need substantial rotation sometimes do better with fixed braces. If that is your situation we will say so rather than sell you something that will disappoint you.

It also depends on you. Aligners only work while they are in your mouth. If you know you will not wear them consistently, fixed braces may genuinely be the better choice.

Most cases run somewhere between six and eighteen months. Simple crowding at the front can finish faster, and complex bite correction takes longer.

You will come in every six to ten weeks so we can check progress and hand over the next sets of aligners. The visits are short.

You usually start seeing visible change within the first couple of months, which is what keeps people motivated through the rest of it.

If aligners are not the right fit, tooth coloured ceramic braces are far less noticeable than traditional metal and can handle movements aligners struggle with.

For adults whose main concern is just the front teeth showing when they smile, shorter focused treatments can achieve a lot in less time and at lower cost.

We will lay out the realistic options with the tradeoffs attached, including doing nothing, which is sometimes a perfectly reasonable choice.

Teeth drift for life. Without a retainer they will gradually move back toward where they started, and that is true regardless of how the straightening was done.

You will get retainers at the end of treatment, worn full time at first and then usually just at night, long term.

This is the part people underestimate. Wearing a retainer a few nights a week is the difference between keeping your result and paying to redo it in ten years.