Why You Should Wear Your Retainer After Braces

The great majority of people with misaligned teeth can blame genetics. Unfortunately, if you don’t wear your retainer after you are done your braces off, your genetics can come into play again, and your teeth will go right back to where they were before. Without the retainer, an orthodontic relapse can occur. This means that the teeth fall back into a position of misalignment, and this can take a lot of effort to correct.

Reasons Why Retainers Are Important

There are more reasons to wear your retainer than you might think! Here is a short list of things that make the retainer so important to your new smile.

• They stabilize your bite. Once you get your braces off, you must know that during the whole process of having braces changed a lot when it comes to your jawbone and teeth. The soft tissue of the jaw needs time to realign. Retainers give it this chance.

• They maintain space for wisdom teeth. Many times, braces are applied to younger people who have not yet gotten their wisdom teeth. If your teeth are held in place with retainers, there is a higher chance that there will be space in your mouth for your wisdom teeth to grow in. This will help solve the problems that your wisdom teeth may have caused, as well as allow you to avoid a possibly painful extraction.

• They prevent orthodontic relapse, or treatment reversal. As we mentioned earlier, without retainers, orthodontic relapse isn’t just likely, it’s inevitable. Your teeth will start to move and float around back to a position of misalignment rather quickly. If you don’t wear your retainer for just a few days, you will notice a difference. The teeth do not have firm roots in their current positions, so wearing your retainer is extremely important, especially at first.