I went back to the dentist on Wednesday where he told me he would be fixing 'buttons' to five of my teeth and filing down other teeth to make room for surrounding teeth to move. Nice.
The buttons are tooth enamel-coloured lumps that are attached to your teeth. The number of buttons and the position of them are attached depending on your othodontic requirements and are designed to allow the trays to grip and turn certain teeth. Compared to traditional braces, Invisalign's main drawback is that they trays are unable to grip teeth so buttons correspond to ridges in the trays which pull teeth the way they need to go. These were attached pretty painlessly and though I've read that buttons can sometimes fall off, mine seem pretty secure for the timebeing. At the end of treatment they're filed off. I don't think they're particularly obvious as they are attached to something like for fourth and fifth teeth at the top and bottom. I wouldn't like to have them on my front teeth though. You can see one of the botton in the far right corner of my mouth.
Having the buttons made putting the trays on and taking them out significantly more difficult.
The filing was never going to be pleasant and I was amused to see a little gap in my front two teeth when it was done, as you can see in the photo. As I said before, this is designed to make space for other teeth and should quickly close up.
It turns out I wasn't ready for my new trays yet, so was instructed to keep wearing my first set for another three days which I was a little disappointed by. They did, however, feel a lot tighter with the buttons attached so it clearly made sense to keep wearing the first set for a few more days.
The first time I tried to take the aligners out with the buttons on took about half an hour of bitching and moaning until I found a way to leverage them out so I could eat dinner.
After a couple of days this went back to normal and yesterday, with a bit of force, I managed to get my second set in! It was so difficult that I was thinking I might need to go back to the dentist but they're in now and feeling pretty snug. Despite them going in just yesterday, I'm not finding taking them in or out very difficult. Well, that brings me up to date. Will post again when new developments come in.
After tray one
