1. Tartar is hardened plaque  

Plaque older than 24 hours begins to react with minerals in our saliva and hardens. Yup, science teachers never mentioned that when they taught us about calcium, phosphate and magnesium!    

2. Tartar won’t come off with a toothbrush. Yikes! 

Once it’s mineralised, it can’t be brushed away. Tartar forms at the gumline and around brace brackets, providing more places for bacteria to breed.  

3. Tartar teams with plaque to make gums glum 

Tartar is another home for plaque. Gums find plaque irritating. They can become red, swollen and bleed. Ignoring tartar’s contribution to sore gums could risk gum disease later and this can stop orthodontic treatment. 

4. Tartar increases the risk of white spots staining your teeth 

Your teeth’s armour of enamel is under attack from additional plaque acids. This can cause decalcification spots which you can learn about in our resource White Spots, Yellow Stains and Is that a Cavity? Don’t Let Wearing Braces Land You in a House of Horrors 

5. Tartar needs removing by a hygienist 

Tartar needs scraping away with a specialist tool called a scale. It doesn’t hurt and your teeth will feel super smooth afterwards. Ok, we hear you, as smooth as they can feel in braces! 

Once the hygienist has scaled tartar from your teeth, you can get on with the job of preventing it coming back.  

Braces are an exciting megacity as far as plaque is concerned.  Your brace provides plaque penthouses, apartments, hotels and swinging hotspots that bacteria love to frequent. You’re one person cleaning that whole city three times a day!  Makes you feel like you need a lie down to recover, right? 

Despite your best efforts, sometimes you can miss an area through poor brushing technique or by using products that aren’t formulated to take care of your orthodontic care needs.   

Healthy Smile’s here to help you minimise the risk to your teeth and gums.  

With a subscription to a Fixed Brace Daily Care Kit, you’re using medical grade orthodontic products to double down on plaque eviction and keep those pearly whites brushed up in their braces.   

After a visit to the hygienist, there’s plenty you can do to keep tartar out between appointments. 

Come flu or festival season, study or that was a week at work, come hell, heartbreak or highwater, you’ve got to brush! It’s singularly the one thing you cannot skip. Make one of those brushings before you go to bed – no plaque sleepovers for you! 

Best brushing practice in braces? 

• Use a V-shaped brush - Those ordinary toothbrushes don’t quite reach into the intricate gaps of your brace quite as easily. The VITIS Access Toothbrush straddles your arch wire with all the skill of an Olympic gymnast so you can pay better attention to your gumline and brackets.  
• Brush for 2 minutes - Using the same pattern when you brush as, once the habit is formed, you can be sure you’ve covered all areas. You know the score: outer upper – inner upper – upper biting areas - outside lower – inside lower – lower biting areas. Plus, areas your hygienist has pointed out need your extra attention. You can always work up a dance to go with it, but that’s optional! 
• Clean your gumline - Brushing where tooth meets gum is important as tartar does love itself a gumline! A Monotip Brush is designed to help with gumline cleaning. Its small head doesn’t get tangled in your brackets and it will sweep just under the gumline where plaque thinks it can hide. It can’t. You’ve got this! 
• Check your toothpaste has a semi-liquid texture - As far as plaque is concerned, remember, our braces are a whole housing estate of homes! Those micro niches mean it’s easy for plaque to move in and squat. A toothpaste formulated to coat fixed braces and teeth is plaque’s idea of a paradise lost! VITIS Orthodontic Toothpaste, is semi-liquid so it will flow into the nooks and crannies of your brace delivering maximum fluoride protection to enamel. Not only that, but its formulation kills plaque bacteria and stops it reproducing. Hurrah – your oral health does a little dance!  

In between brushing, stop plaque multiplying.  

Use VITIS Orthodontic Mouthwash. It contains Cetylpyridinium Chloride (let’s just call it CPC and plaque’s arch enemy, hey?). According to this study, CPC both halts and kills bacteria.  When you keep the biofilm (that’s the living plaque film on your teeth) under control, you’re much less likely to develop tartar. 

Wearing a brace means that the field of play minding those interdental gaps is ever-changing. But that’s the idea, right?  

For the gold standard in interdental brushes, try Interprox Interdental Brushes.  When it comes to preventing tartar, their dual-coloured brush feeds back all you need to know about where plaque is building or where gums are becoming irritated and bleeding.  

If there isn’t room for an interdental brush, flossing is where it’s at. Oral B Superfloss and Proxysoft 3 in 1 Floss make cleaning the impossible possible as both are equipped with a stiff end to thread through your brace and teeth. And they said it couldn’t be done – how wrong they were! Happy flossing.  

Although plaque hardens with saliva, it doesn’t do it straight away. In fact, the minerals in your saliva help keep your tooth enamel strong.   

Braces can alter the flow of saliva around your mouth. Plaque can multiply faster, and undetected plaque begins to form tartar.  

Support your mouth’s hydration with XyliMelts. Xylitol helps prevent plaque building up and stimulates saliva flow.  

What better way to keep tartar out of your mouth than to make the plaque hunting fun? We don’t know anyone who can resist a disclosing tablet.  Plaque ditches its cloak of invisibility, and you get the satisfaction of knowing where to concentrate a little more with your brushing. Show the family you have them at your peril; it can all get a little competitive! 

TePe Plaqsearch are formulated to help you understand how well you brush. Newer plaque turns red and plaque over 12 hours old turns purple. When we’re learning to brush to prevent tartar, it’s the purple plaque that helps us learn the bits we’re missing.  

Switching to a less sugary diet is always a wise move when wearing fixed braces. Remember, keeping plaque down is important in preventing tartar. Drink water or milk and choose savoury snacks like cheese.  We’ve got the low down on brace-friendly nibbling in Healthy Smile Pharmacy Helps Get You Snacking.