A monthly note from Chicago Beautiful Smiles, by Dr. Connor Lemieux
Of all the things patients bring up when they sit down in our chair, white spots are one of the quietest. Some people point right at them, but a lot of people never mention them at all. They’ve lived with them so long that they’ve stopped expecting anyone to do anything about them.
For years, that expectation was mostly right. The honest answer from most dentists was either that nothing could be done, or that the only fix was to drill the spot away and cover it. And so people were told to live with it, or they weren’t told anything at all.
There’s a better option now, and it’s one of our favorite treatments to do. It takes care of something people have quietly carried for a long time, and the results tend to surprise them. It’s called ICON.
First, What a White Spot Actually is…
Here’s the part most people don’t know, and it’s the key to the whole thing.
A white spot is not a stain. A stain is something added to the tooth, like coffee or red wine settling onto the surface over time. A white spot is the opposite. It’s a small area where the enamel is slightly more porous than the enamel around it, and that patch bends light differently, which is what your eye reads as chalky and white.
Sometimes it traces back to braces, where a spot was hard to keep clean and started to form under the bracket. Sometimes it’s fluorosis, or something that happened while the tooth was still forming, long before you’d remember. The cause varies. The result is the same: a patch that catches the light wrong.
Once you understand that, the fix makes a lot of sense.
How ICON Works
Because a white spot is porous rather than stained, we don’t have to remove anything to treat it. We work the other direction.
We apply a series of gels that gently open up those pores, then infiltrate the area with a thin resin that has the same optical qualities as healthy enamel. Once that resin is in and the light passes through evenly again, the spot blends into the tooth around it. What was chalky and obvious becomes, in most cases, hard to find.
No drill. No needles, no numbing. Nothing removed. We’re filling in microscopic spaces that are already there, not cutting anything out.
What The Visit is Like
Plan for about an hour. There’s no numbing, because there’s nothing to numb for. We clean the tooth, apply the gels, rinse, work in the resin, and set it with a light. You see the result the same day.
Who Tends to Come in For This
Three groups, mostly.
Adults who’ve had white spots since childhood and long ago decided they were just part of their smile. Teenagers and young adults who did everything their orthodontist asked, wore the braces for years, and then got them off only to find white marks along the gumline. And parents who noticed something on a child’s front tooth and wanted to know what it was and whether it mattered.
If you see yourself or your kid in any of that, this is worth a conversation.
The Honest Part
ICON is not magic, and we won’t pretend it is. How completely a spot disappears depends a lot on how deep it goes. Shallow spots often vanish almost entirely. Deeper ones usually improve dramatically but may not disappear completely. Once in a while a spot needs a different approach, or a combination of treatments, to look its best.
The only way to know how your teeth will respond is to look at them. When you come in, we’ll tell you honestly what we think you can expect, and we’ll never talk you into something that isn’t going to do what you want.
If You’ve Been Living With These
Come in and let us take a look. Most of the time we can tell you fairly quickly whether ICON is a good fit, and if it is, you’re usually looking at a single visit to be done with something you may have been carrying for years.
Next month: That One Tooth That’s Darker Than the Rest? Here’s Why, and What We Can Do
