50 Shades of White

Looking at my current content and my Instagram posts within the past 6 months, you would have never guessed it but I used to hate smiling with my teeth. As a child, I had different dental issues that included the extraction of 4 teeth, removing my wisdom teeth, getting a root canal, wearing braces for over 4 years, and multiple fillings. Let’s just say that I wasn’t blessed with perfect pearly whites and I’ve spent my fair share of time in the dentist’s chair. Because of all of the constant work done to my teeth, I began to dislike my smile and adopted a tight-lipped smile anytime my photo was taken. You’ll see obvious evidence of this in many of my Instagram posts, even up until mid-last year.

It took me a long time to overcome the dislike of my own smile and to be able to smile openly with my teeth showing. The main reason being that I was tired of constantly reminding myself to keep my mouth shut anytime I had my photo taken and wanted to feel comfortable enough with myself to smile openly. Also knowing that Peter and I would be getting married in a few years’ times, I wanted to give myself the time to become comfortable with a teethy-smile, so that I would be able to do so on our wedding day and still love the outcome. There are only so many pictures with a RBF expression that you can take before people actually begin to believe that your personality is as uptight as how you look in your photos!

After practicing my smile, the next step towards the direction of wedding prep would be to polish up those Chiclets (10 points for anyone that gets that reference)! As a teen, my parents thought that professionally whitening your teeth was a frivolous expense, so I would often save up and wait for Crest Whitestrips to go on sale at my local Shoppers Drug Mart so that I could buy it and brighten up my smile by myself. With the numerous cups of coffee that I would consume on the daily, whitening was a necessity to ensure that my teeth didn’t appear stained. After a while, I fell off of the routine and allowed nature to take its course. With our wedding coming up around the corner, both Peter and I thought that it was the right time to begin the whitening process all over again. Nobody wants stained looking teeth in their wedding photos am I right?!

It only made sense to restart the process exactly where we had left off—with Crest Whitestrips. Only this time technology has caught up quite a bit and the Whitestrips now also come with a neat little LED light which helps to speed up the process and delivers results in the short time frame of only 10 treatments! While the regular treatment used to take up an entire month (that’s a long time!), the blue light technology of Crest® 3D White Whitestrips with Light is one of the fastest over-the-counter whitening systems that you can do by yourself at home. The additional LED tech helps to weaken up the bonds within the stains so that the whitening agent can specifically target and absorb all of the yellow at a faster rate without any additional increase in sensitivity. Although you can complete the entire system in the span of 1 treatment a day for a total of 10 days, I’ll be honest by confessing that I forgot to whiten my teeth quite a few times, so the entire process took me about 2.5 weeks—which is still shorter than an entire month!

Now you may be wondering why in the world we would start whitening our teeth so early on in the wedding-planning process if we don’t plan on holding the wedding until 2020. And there is a particular reason why we’ve chosen to do so. With our wedding about 24 months away, we have quite a bit of time on our hands to get everything done, but I’d rather get more done sooner than later if possible since there’s so much more to do. With the new Crest® 3D White Whitestrips with Light system’s results lasting up to 36 months, whitening our teeth was one of the first tasks that we knew we could complete early on in the planning process, and not have to worry about it again. Efficiency at its finest? I think so!

Not only can I check off pearly whites from our long list of wedding-prep, but I also love that I can get it done a home while doing work instead of booking off an hour of my time to pop into a dentist’s office. I’m a huge fan of multi-tasking and being able to do multiple things at once so anything that I can get done while at home is always a huge plus. Seriously though, coupled together with the ridiculously affordable price of $119.99, I can’t ever envision myself getting my teeth professionally whitened in a dental office. Not only do you safe yourself time, but you’re also saving yourself so much money!

I’m so excited to have already crossed off one item on the wedding-planning checklist and to have whiter and more vibrant teeth that makes it easier to pull off that teethy smile with confidence. It’s surprising how much more confident I felt about my smile after noticing my whiter teeth. Sometimes it really is the smaller things that count!

Photography Credits: The Dunk Listt
This post was sponsored by Crest, however all views are 100% honest and my own.