Invisalign vs. Fingernails
There are several good things about Invisalign that go beyond merely straightening your crooked-ass teeth. One of these things is that it is physically impossible to bite your nails with the aligners in. I have bitten my nails for something like 20 years, and I have tried a bunch of ways to stop, like getting weekly manicures, painting my nails with polish that tastes like hot-pepper chemical ass, and just qutting cold turkey. None of them have worked.
But now I am simply incapable of biting my nails. It is just Not An Option. Score one for Invisalign!
But fingernails and Invisalign have a deeper, darker relationship than it might appear at first. In order to remove the aligners when you want to eat, brush your teeth, etc, you have to use your fingernails. When I first got the aligners and realized that I couldn’t bite my nails off I decided that I had better just clip them like a normal person.
I then tried to remove my aligners to eat, and found that I was incapable of doing so. Well, I suppose I should qualify that: I was incapable of doing so without shoving the remarkably hard plastic of the aligners underneath my nail beds, which, as you can imagine, feels absolutely lovely.
So a warning to those of you who are getting or have just gotten Invisalign: don’t clip your fingernails entirely off, or you will go through days and days of pain.
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Win-win. I love it.
Yeah I found that out the hard way. I usually trim my finger nails a week before my next set that way they have time to grow back by the next set.
While struggling to remove my first set of aligners, I broke both of my thumbnails on the bottom aligner. The rest of the two weeks has been pretty painful, as you do have to jam the remaining nail under the edge of the aligner to get it to budge. It’s that or starve to death!
Thanks for your experiment. I have looked at the Invisalign cleaning system flier with horror! I too, figured that I can get by without it for the two weeks that each set of aligners is used, but I am worried about the retainers…those are going to HAVE to be cleaned somehow!