As a beauty blogger, I feel like I should be posting more pictures of myself with the makeup I’m always blathering on about actually on my face. But one of the reasons I don’t do it too often (besides the fact that I’m not skilled in the realm of selfie-taking) is that I always want to smile with my teeth showing, but I was always pretty insecure about them. I had never done any whitening systems or strips before, so I was left with a lovely slight yellow tinge that I didn’t really know how to get rid of. So imagine my excitement when I was contacted by Smile Brilliant to see if I was interested in testing out their whitening system*.
The idea behind this system is that it’s the same thing you’d get if you went to a dentist, but you’re able to do it in the comfort of your own home for a much lower price. You are first sent a kit to make molds of your teeth for them to make custom-fitted trays. This includes three sets of base and catalyst putty components and two trays. You simply mix the two kinds of putty together, place it in the tray, and make a mold of your teeth (they provide really easy to follow directions for this). You then mail your molds back in the provided, prepaid envelope, and a few days later you get your custom-fitted trays! So then you can apply a thin line of the whitening gel into your trays as often or as little as you’d like. I’d highly recommend also picking up the Desensitizing gel as well, which you apply after the whitening gel.
I’ll be honest, it took me forever to get around to making the molds of my teeth to send in to get my trays. I was worried about messing them up, and there was only one extra set of putty components if I did - what if I messed up both trays? But when I actually sat down to do it, it only took me about 10 minutes total and was super easy. If you’re embarrassed easily, do this on your own. I had literal buckets of drool just coming out of my mouth (sorry guys) when waiting for the molds to harden in there - buckets. Within a few days I had my custom trays and was ready to start whitening!
Smile Brilliant says you can keep the trays with whitening gel in anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours. I got into the routine of doing mine for about an hour on every weeknight before bed and gave myself a break on the weekends. I would then load the trays with some of the desensitizing gel and keep that in for around 10 minutes. I never experienced any sensitivity whatsoever, although if I didn’t properly wipe away any excess whitening gel that rose up out of the trays when I put them in, I would get a small amount of gum irritation - nothing too bad, and nothing that lasted for more than an hour though.
Apologies for the slightly different lighting - it must have been a cloudier day when I took the before picture! But both pictures were taken around the same time of day in the same place.
After a month of continuous use, my teeth really did get whiter. The aim of whitening treatments like these is to remove stains and get your teeth back to their natural state, rather than totally bleach your teeth to a pure white (which would be awful for your teeth as you could imagine). So while my smile is not dazzling and won't be blinding anyone anytime soon, I wasn’t expecting that and didn't want that. As I’m always trying to go for a natural look in my makeup and appearance, I really prefer this “enhanced” version of my smile, “your teeth but better” if you will, rather than a Ross from Friends look.
Overall I’m super pleased with the system and will continue using it every so often to top up and keep my smile bright. Have you ever tried whitening your teeth before?