I was about to spend $400 on professional teeth whitening when my hygienist told me what she uses to keep her own teeth sparkling white, for thirty dollars. I cancelled the appointment that night.
But let me back up, I've been drinking two cups of coffee every morning since college. I'm fifty-three. Thirty years of coffee on my teeth. They're not damaged. They're not rotten. They're just yellow, and it gets worse every year.
I tried Crest Whitestrips once. They're these thin plastic strips you stick to your teeth. You're supposed to wear them every day for two weeks. I lasted three days. By the third morning, room-temperature water made me flinch. My teeth felt like someone stuck ice needles in them. I threw the rest of the box under the bathroom sink and never touched it again.
I tried charcoal toothpaste after that. ZERO results (just a gray sink). A whitening pen from Walgreens leaked in my bag after four days of nothing. After that, I stopped trying.
There's a photo from my daughter's wedding, four years ago. I'm actually smiling in it, and the first thing I saw was my teeth. You know that feeling when you look at a photo and your eyes go straight to the thing you were hoping wouldn't show? I never posted it. I can share it now because those aren't my teeth anymore, thank god. It's still a hard photo to look at, but you can see what I mean.
