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Will Rembrandt Whitening Strips get you Tom-Cruise white teeth?

It’s award show season, and I can’t help but be jealous. Not of the success, money or talent of the Hollywood elite. No, I’m the weirdo who covets their teeth. Damn, they’re white.

I think the whitest paint chip on the planet should be named Tom Cruise’s  bicuspid white. (Benjamin Moore if you’d like to hire me to come up with paint color names, I’m available.)

So, I decided to buy some whitening strips. I’ve tried Crest whitening strips in the past. They work really well. I just ended up never wanting to use them because they burn my teeth. 

This scares me because teeth are hard and tough and unfeeling, so when a product makes my teeth feel like they’re on fire, I get a little nervous. (It’s like seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger cry. It just seems wrong.)

So I thought I’d give Rembrandt strips a try, which are actually more like a sports mouth guard than a strip.

The good news is they don’t slip around like the Crest strips can. The bad news is they adhere so tightly to teeth, that you feel like you might remove your teeth, along with the strip. 

Day one I did notice an ever so slight whitening of my teeth, but the problem was it was uneven. The next time I tried to mold the plastic around each tooth better. That seemed to help with the unevenness, but the whitening wasn’t really happening. 

It said it might take 5 days before seeing real results, so I kept going. Day 5 - still not much whitening.  They actually give you 7 days worth of strips. Just in case you want your teeth to be even whiter. 

(I bought whitening strips. Isn’t that kind of a given?) Day 7 was a little better, but I have to say the results were just OK. Personally, I think Crest Whitening Strips are so much better. So, from now on, I’ll just suck it up and deal with the pain. 

You know what they say, “no pain, no gain”.  I just didn't realize it also applied to teeth. 

Maybe they should make the box more yellow-ish, so if you compare it to your teeth, after using them, you'll think your teeth are really white.  What?

What's your most effective teeth-whitening method?

a toothbrush that can make you look 10 years younger

I remember seeing a commercial years back, that claimed that whiter teeth made you look 10 years younger.  Why I remembered this, rather than, say, the order of the planets (all I remember is it has something to do with pancakes), I do not know.

All this talk of pancakes and whiter teeth brings me to the remarkable Sonicare toothbrush.

Why remarkable?  First off, there’s a timer, so YOU WILL brush your teeth for two minutes. It’s kind of like a personal trainer for teeth brushing.  It pushes you further than you would ever go on your own.  

Secondly, this brush will vibrate the crap out of your teeth (literally and figuratively). It generates 31,000 bristle sweeps per minute. 

I don’t care how much coffee you drink in the AM,
you still can’t reach this speed with a manual toothbrush.

And it's scientifically proven to remove coffee, tea and tobacco stains (and that yellow cheese powder on Smart Puffs, that last one was my own addition)- whitening teeth, they say, up to 2.5 shades in 2 weeks. And when you run your tongue over your teeth after using it, you get that post-dental cleaning feeling (with out having the humiliation of wearing a bib and drooling all over yourself.)

If I go out of town for the weekend and don’t bring my Sonicare, my teeth look like I was away at chewing tobacco camp.  I personally, think it’s better than even whitening strips (probably because I’m too lazy and forgetful to use whitening strips).

Here's what www.dentistry.com has to say about the subject: “Tooth whitening can take years off your age and is much less expensive than a face lift.”   Shouldn’t they be concentrating on cavities and gingivitis? What’s with the talk about face lifts? I know dentists are doctors too, but please keep that drill inside my mouth.

 

I've gotten some emails asking where people can find the products I talk about in my posts. Feel free to use Google “search the web” box, to the right, to find out where you can find it (and for how much).