Put your money where your mouth is

Britesmile

The colour of my smile wasn't something that bothered me.

Much. But I drink a good deal of coffee and red wine, and I felt this stained my teeth and made me look, well, older. I wanted to have something done about it, particularly because it doesn't feel like so much of a vanity treatment, somehow. And, given a chance to improve it, well, who'd say no?

My treatment, at the London Smile Clinic, took little more than an hour. A resin dam is put over the gums, and lips are moisturised before the bleaching gel is put on the teeth and the light that activates it switched on for 20 minutes. The procedure is repeated thrice, but time passes quickly, with The Simpsons on the DVD headset.

And afterwards? It's fantastic.

The change in my teeth is startling - to me, anyway. No one else has noticed, but it's a real confidence booster.

Britesmile costs from pounds 600. Call 0800 0768 768.

Matthew Scott

Home alone

Bleaching your teeth at home lacks the glamour and pizzazz of the walk-in-yellow-walkout-white treatments, but it does have the colossal advantage of being half the price. Dr Harris Sidelsky fashioned a pair of moulded trays, and supplied me with five little syringes of peroxide gel, which has to be squeezed precisely onto the parts of the tray that touch the front of the tooth, and then left in the mouth overnight. It's not pleasant, sleeping with a mouthful of plastic and bleach, and it has taken a few weeks (whenever my teeth become sensitive, I leave it out for a couple of days), but the results are terrific. And, of course, I still have the trays for when I need to repeat the process.

Cost: pounds 295; Harris Sidelsky, 020 8455 3361.

Capital Dental Care

My teeth were nothing to smile about. Fortunately, Dr Sunny Luthra's 30-minute AHD LumaArch teeth-whitening laser treatment promised the smile of a lifetime in the space of a lunchtime. After a quick polish to get rid of the browner stains, Dr Luthra paints the teeth with hydrogen peroxide, then activates it with three 10-minute blasts of his laser. The preparation - involving rubber gum protection and a plastic cheek retractor - tends to make one feel like a gimp from a highly specialised porn film, and the treatment is mildly uncomfortable. It is quick, however, and the results are impressive. Dr Luthra lightened my teeth by a clearly visible 12 shades (his record is 14), without giving me the perma-brite, scare- the-children glare of an American TV evangelist. The sensitivity and occasional sharp pain that lasted a few hours after the treatment was a small price to pay for being able to grin again.

Cost: pounds 500; Dr Luthra, Capital Dental Care, 298 Fulham Road, SW10, 020 7349 8889.

Nick Curtis

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