Tools of the Dental Trade: The Polishing Toothpaste (2024)

FAQs

Tools of the Dental Trade: The Polishing Toothpaste? ›

What is polishing toothpaste? Dental hygienists use a flavored polishing toothpaste made of pumice, flavoring, and usually a tiny amount of fluoride. This normally follows the scaling process, which is when hygienists use metal tools to scrape plaque and tartar from your teeth.

A polisher is a dental handpiece that allows your hygienist to polish each tooth. Polishing is an important step in keeping your gums and teeth healthy and is essential for maintaining oral hygiene. Polishers are stainless steel air-driven, hand-held electrical devices.

Tooth polishing pastes are called prophy pastes, an abbreviation of prophylaxis, which refers to the preventive, disease-preventing effects of tooth cleaning and polishing. Dental hygienists choose between fine, medium, and coarse grit pastes to fill the rubber cup that delivers the paste to the tooth surface.

The polishing agents thus include insoluble phosphate salts, such as insoluble sodium metaphosphate, insoluble potassium metaphosphate, calcium pyrophosphate, magnesium orthophosphate, trimagnesium orthophosphate, tricalcium phosphate, dicalcium phosphate dihydrate, anhydrous dicalcium phosphate and the like, calcium ...

The use of prophylaxis paste has been proven clinically to smooth the enamel surface after hygiene cleaning. This helps to remove calculus, soft deposits, plaque and staining to all supragingival and unattached subgingival tooth surfaces.

The iWhite Tooth Polisher is an easy-to-use dental polishing device which will help to remove plaque and superficial stains by circular rotating movements with a specialized polishing tip.

Fluoride free or Fluoride prophy pastes in tubes, pots or mini cups in a wide range of flavours and grits. Use the filters to select the brand, flavour or type of prophy paste or browse the full polishing paste range below.

Abrasive agents are used for polishing to make the teeth lustrous and give smooth and shiny surfaces. Abrasive agents are included in dentifrices and polishing pastes, with the difference that the particles are bigger in the latter.

While using baking soda to clean your teeth at home is generally safe, it's not a good idea to try polishing at home. Some products might have ingredients that are too hard on your teeth. If you polish your teeth too much, you can: Wear down tooth enamel.

What is the difference between prophy and polishing? ›

No Pastes: With a traditional polishing tool, dentists are forced to use abrasive pastes to remove stains and plaque. With a Prophy-Jet, a combination of water and baking soda is used to remove the same materials.

Toothpaste, especially the paste-based variety, contains mild abrasives that act as fine polishing agents.

Rubber cup polishing is the most common technique for removing stains and plaque and for polishing teeth. An abrasive polishing agent is placed in a rubber polishing cup that is rotated slowly and carefully by a prophy angle attached to the slow-speed handpiece.

Be sure to avoid any toothpastes that contain activated charcoal. Too often, unregulated toothpastes containing extremely harsh particles end up causing serious enamel damage and permanent discoloration.

Fluoride varnish is a dental treatment that can help prevent tooth decay, slow it down, or stop it from getting worse. Fluoride varnish is made with fluoride, a mineral that can strengthen tooth enamel (outer coating on teeth).

Types of Dental Polishing

With this, they'll use a slurry of water and baking soda with air and water pressure to polish your teeth. It's sometimes used with an ultrasonic plaque remover. Air polishing is used in between teeth and cracks where the rubber cup can't reach and to remove plaque above your gum line.

Scalers. Scalers are hand-held metal teeth cleaning tools that scrape off the plaque and calculus (tartar) from the teeth. The pointed end is used for the tooth section above the gumline, while the curved blunt end is used to reach below the gumline without injuring the gum tissue.

Often an ultrasound scraper is used first to get rid of the bulk of the tartar, followed by specialised hand held instruments to scrape away any stubborn remains. The next step is to 'polish' the teeth to make the surface really smooth.

Cream for polishing denture acrylics.

With Pala Polish you can increase aesthetics of the final prosthesis. You can use Pala Polish at your normal workbench in a dry environment with a small brush or rag wheel to create a high shine.