Sale Dental Spa
Between 2019 and 2020 three patients kept diaries of their teeth straightening and we published them in fourteen short instalments, none long enough to be much use alone. Read together they add up to a reasonably honest account of what the treatment involves, so we have put them into one piece.
Two of the three were treated with Invisalign. The third was straightened by a method we no longer offer, so her treatment is not described here, though what she says about retainers is the most useful thing in the series. One of the two Invisalign diarists worked at the practice at the time, which is worth knowing.
Nobody here decided quickly. All three had thought about it for years first.
Joanna Lambe wore a removable brace as a teenager, with no retainer at the end of it, and a bad experience at the follow-up appointment left her avoiding dentists for years afterwards. Over the following two decades a gap opened between her upper front teeth and those teeth drifted forward. She noticed it most in photographs. Two children and a business kept it at the bottom of the list until she decided it would not stay there.
Armand Beasley had slightly crooked upper teeth and crowded lower ones. He only really registered it when he started seeing himself on television, and then found he was angling photographs to keep his bottom teeth out of shot.
Both landed on the same point: teeth keep moving throughout adult life, and straightening in your teens does not settle the question for good.
The Smile Design consultation is free and is mostly conversation. Our treatment coordinator asks what you would change if you could, and whether you would wear aligners. Both diarists found that a more useful starting point than being told what was wrong with them.
Then comes a 3D scan with an intraoral scanner, which takes a few minutes and involves no impression trays. From it we build an on-screen animation of the plan: your teeth as they are now, the sequence of movements, and the projected end position, which you can rotate and view from any angle. It is emailed to you.
Two things to be clear about. That preview is a projection of what the planning software intends, not a guarantee of the finished result. And it is on-screen only. Invisalign does not involve a physical Trial Smile, where a temporary mock-up is placed over your teeth in the chair so you can see it in your own face. That belongs to bonding and veneers. Both diarists said that seeing their own teeth in that much detail was uncomfortable. Most people have never really looked.
Different clinicians can reach different plans from the same mouth, so a second opinion before committing is reasonable.
Small tooth-coloured attachments, sometimes called buttons, are bonded onto some of your teeth at the fitting. The aligners grip these to apply force in the right direction. They stay on for the whole treatment, and you will feel them with your tongue and have to brush around them. You go home with the first aligners, a case, cleaning tablets and chewies, small soft cylinders you bite on to seat a new aligner properly.
The honest version of the first fortnight is that there is some discomfort and it is not much. Armand's lower teeth were crowded and getting that aligner in and out was awkward at first. Each time you move to a new aligner the teeth ache for a day or so, which is the point of them. Ordinary painkillers cover it. Both diarists had expected considerably worse.
The thing the diaries missed, and should not have, is speech. Most people notice their speech is slightly altered for the first few days and some get a light lisp on s sounds. It settles as your tongue adapts, usually within a week, and talking out loud a lot speeds it up.
This is the treatment. Aligners only move teeth while they are in your mouth, and the prescribed wear is 20 to 22 hours a day. Everything else is detail.
The aligners come out for every meal and every drink except water, and go back in after you have brushed. Three meals becomes three rounds of remove, eat, brush, rinse the aligners, replace. Tea, coffee, curry and red wine are all fine with the aligners out. What stains the trays is putting them straight back over teeth you have not cleaned.
Joanna had been eating six times a day. Within a few weeks she was down to three, not through willpower but because the routine is not worth going through for a biscuit. Many people find the same. We would not present that as a benefit of the treatment, but you should expect it.
None of this is difficult. It is just relentless, every day, for months, and it is the part people underestimate.
Losing them is the classic. Joanna wrapped a set in a paper napkin at a restaurant, turned to talk to someone, and the table was cleared. They went in the bin with the napkins, and she needed her next set released early. The rule is simple: the case goes wherever your phone goes. Aligners left loose in a bag get bent out of shape.
Do not clean them with toothpaste; it is abrasive and scratches them cloudy. A cleaning tablet in a glass of cold water for fifteen minutes, then a gentle going over with a soft toothbrush, is enough. Do not put them down on a bathroom shelf either; they are transparent on purpose and easy to lose sight of.
Busy days are the real test. Armand spent a full day hosting on stage with no realistic window to take the aligners out, clean them and put them back, so he left them in. Only one person noticed all day. That cuts both ways: they are genuinely hard to see, which also makes them easy to neglect.
You come back every few weeks for a progress check and the next batch of aligners. Interproximal reduction, or IPR, often happens at these appointments. It is the gentle filing of very small amounts of enamel between pairs of teeth, creating the space they need to move into. Both diarists had it done more than once and both described it as quick and painless. In some cases it is what makes an extraction unnecessary.
How often you change aligners is set by your dentist, not by you. It might be every seven, ten or fourteen days, and it can change mid-treatment in either direction. Joanna was moved from fortnightly to weekly because her teeth were responding well. Armand went the other way, from ten days to fourteen, over a busy December.
The diaries skated over refinements. Near the end of the planned series it is common to need a fresh scan and a further set of aligners to finish movements the first series did not fully achieve. This is normal and not a sign anything has gone wrong. Ask before you start whether refinements are included in the fee you are quoted.
Joanna's plan was 35 aligners over roughly twelve months, shortened when she moved to weekly changes. Armand was fitted in August, reached the fourteenth and last aligner of his series by January, and went back in early February to be assessed for what came next.
As a general guide, straightforward cases run between six and twelve months and complex ones take longer. Some are not suitable for aligners at all, and your dentist should tell you which category you are in before you pay anything.
Joanna's gap closed until the spacing matched the other side, a rotated tooth turned so the whole face of it showed rather than three quarters, and her upper teeth came back and in. With six aligners still to go she wrote that she would have been content to stop there. Armand's lower crowding improved enough that he stopped composing photographs around it. He was clear throughout that he was not after dental perfection and wanted to keep his teeth slightly irregular. That is a perfectly good outcome to ask for.
What aligners do not do is change the colour or the shape of a tooth. They move the teeth you already have. Both plans put other things afterwards, in a deliberate order: whitening at £275 once the teeth are in their final position, composite bonding from £300 per tooth to even up edges, and any crown work matched to the final shade last of all. Matching a shade to teeth that are about to move would be a waste of time.
The most useful sentence in fourteen posts came from the diarist who was not treated with Invisalign at all. Aamna Ali wrote: "Like many teenagers I had braces but because I didn't wear my retainers they moved back."
Joanna's history is the same story told slowly: a teenage brace, no retainer afterwards, and teeth that drifted back over twenty years until she was paying to have them straightened a second time.
Teeth move throughout life. Straightening does not stop that; retention is what holds the result. A retainer worn at night, indefinitely, is part of the treatment rather than an accessory bought at the end. Retainers wear out and get lost, so budget for replacements, and carry on with routine examinations and hygiene appointments as normal. If nobody has explained retention to you before you commit, ask. There is more detail on our Invisalign page.
Invisalign at Sale Dental Spa starts from £2,200, and most cases fall between £2,200 and £4,500 depending on complexity, which mainly means how many aligners you need. Interest free finance over twelve months is available through Tabeo. The Smile Design consultation is free and everything else is on our fees page. Invisalign here is provided by Dr Aisha Ahmed, Dr Hamza Mirza and Dr Mark Williams.
If you have been turning this over for years, a free consultation is a reasonable way to find out what your own case would involve. Book online at sale-dental-care.portal.dental, call 0161 969 7464, or visit 77 Washway Road, Sale, Manchester M33 7TQ.
The Smile Design consultation is free, there is nothing to pay and nothing to commit to. Call 0161 969 7464, or book online and we will take it from there.
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