Are you starting to realise your smile has started to change? You catch a glimpse of yourself in a store window, but there’s something about how you’re looking now compared to how you looked ten years back. It’s not the wrinkles around your eyes. It’s not the grey hair you’ve grown accustomed to. It’s your smile, it looks different.
Your Front Teeth Are Getting Shorter
Every time you take a bite, every time you clench your jaw tight while stressed, every time you grind your teeth at night, you are slowly grinding away (or wearing down) the top surfaces of your front teeth. After many years of grinding away the surfaces of your front teeth, their edges will begin to flatten out. If you had a subtle curve to your front teeth ten years ago, after years of tooth grinding, you may have lost some or all of that curve. A straight line doesn’t read young, it reads tired, and that’s exactly how your younger-looking face will be perceived.
Smaller, Darker Triangles Between Your Teeth
Look closely at the bases of your front teeth; are there small triangular spaces opening up at the bottoms of these teeth? That is gum receding. Gum recession is usually a result of aggressive flossing or brushing. When gum recession occurs, it causes your teeth to appear much longer than they actually are. Additionally, when gums recede, it creates additional space between your teeth. This is an irreversible process.
Your Teeth Look Yellower
As we age, our enamel wears thin and starts to let the yellow colour of our underlying teeth show through more. Although coffee and red wine receive the blame for staining our teeth, the actual culprit is the gradual loss of enamel, allowing the natural yellow colour of our teeth to become visible. Surface whitening treatments can help whiten the stains on the surface of the teeth, but will do virtually nothing to lighten the colour change occurring within the structure of the tooth.
Your Lips Cover More Of The Top Portion Of Your Smile
Do your lips appear to be covering more of the top portion of your upper teeth in comparison to how much of them were covered before? Like the rest of the body’s skin, as we get older, we experience loss of volume and elasticity of our lips. Therefore, since we have lost so much thickness of the lips due to aging, the thinner lips will cover more of the upper teeth as you smile. In addition to hiding some of your upper teeth when you smile, thin lips provide a decreased overall size and less inviting appearance to your whole smile.
Your Lower Front Teeth Feel More Crowded Than Usual
If you find that your bottom two front teeth feel more cramped than they did several years ago, then you aren’t crazy. Over time, teeth tend to move slightly towards the front. Sometimes, they even overlap with each other. While this movement can occur dramatically enough to require orthodontic treatment, in most cases, it simply results in a minor shifting, which can affect the appearance of your smile. However, this shift can still cause noticeable problems with the overall alignment of your lower front teeth and affect both their appearance and function.
What Really Works
This doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. This process is normally slow. Once you realise to be on the lookout for these issues, most of them will be manageable. Even simple things, such as wearing a night guard (if you grind) or visiting the dentist, can help to identify receding gums or excessive tooth loss, which may become difficult to manage later.
Just like the rest of your facial structure, your smile has a history. And that history should allow it to evolve. The idea isn’t to put your teeth into a mold. It’s simply to pay attention to how they’re changing, so when those important changes happen, you’ll recognise them.
