Home Whitening Kits
Home whitening kits may take the form of a gel or paste that is applied to your teeth using a brush or in the form of sticky strips.
Some home whitening kits involve covering your teeth with a whitening agent before placing a mouthguard on your teeth. Certain at-home kits have a heat lamp, blue light, or UV light within the mouthguard to “radiate” the whitening paste. However, a small 2021 study suggests that it is unclear whether this actually increases the gel’s effectiveness.
A mouth guard can keep the bleaching agent on your teeth to increase its absorption and limit how much of the whitening solution comes in contact with your gyms. The ADA has approved gel with 10 percent carbamide for at-home use in overnight mouth guards, according to 2019 research.
The active ingredients in whitening kits approved by home use are at a lower concentration than you would find in a dentist’s office. For that reason, you will need to use the kit every day for several weeks to see visible results. Most at-home whitening kits advertise results within 2 to 4 weeks.
At-home LED teeth-whitening kits may deliver results. But the whitening you see is a result of the gel, not the light. There is not enough data to show definitively that the LED offers a significant improvement over just using a tray with the gel. A systematic review and network meta-analysis showed no difference in the outcomes after whitening treatments either with or without light activation.
A Colgate article references a study from the Journal of Conservative Dentistry with evidence that gel and use of an LED was more effective than gel alone. But the gel used in the study contains at least 37 percent hydrogen peroxide — a percentage used in professional settings only. (At-home gels are made with around 15 percent hydrogen peroxide.) So while there’s evidence out there that LED lights are beneficial for teeth whitening, it seems to be limited to those found at the dentist’s office.