FAQ

An intraoral scan is a faster, more comfortable, and more accurate way to get a three-dimensional “snapshot” of your teeth, which is the starting information needed to make a custom-fitted device for your mouth.

Unlike a physical impression – which involves pressing a putty-like material against your teeth and hoping that you don’t gag while you wait for the material to set – an intraoral scan involves a dentist simply moving a wand-like camera device around your mouth.

That device takes a series of super-accurate images (up to thousands per second), which can be stitched together in software to create a precise, three-dimensional image of your mouth.

With physical impressions, even when taken by a skilled dental professional, the material used to take the impression can sometimes form bubbles, shrink, expand or distort – often not immediately, but before the impression is finally used to make a device – leading to inaccuracies, which result in devices that are less comfortable, don’t work as well, or don’t fit at all.

Because intraoral scans are fully digital, there are no problems with physical distortion. And when problems with a scan do occur (usually just from moving the wand a too quickly or missing a few areas with the wand), they’re usually obvious just from looking at the results, letting your dentist quickly take another scan if needed.

In material science, a “plastic” is simply something made of repeated molecules that can be heated to form a new shape and then cooled to retain that shape.

This comes as a surprise to a lot of folks, but there’s nothing in the basic definition of “plastic” that’s concerning in any way. It includes no mention of specific (potentially toxic) ingredients or how long it lasts. A “plastic” is just a type of material with a really useful shape-changing feature.

But when most people say the word “plastic”, they mean traditional plastic, which is the common type of plastic used essentially everywhere. And traditional plastic does have some concerning features.

Traditional plastic is a plastic material made from petroleum-derived components.

It’s the most common type of plastic, used essentially everywhere. And it’s what most people mean when they say the word “plastic” (though there are alternative plastic materials with important differences from traditional plastics).

PET (water bottles), PETG (clear “clamshell” food containers), TPU (phone cases), polyethylene (grocery bags), polypropylene (takeout food containers), and polystyrene (Styrofoam) are all examples of traditional plastics.

Traditional plastics are derived primarily from fossil fuels such as crude oil or natural gas. The abundance of these raw materials makes traditional plastics inexpensive. And the chemistry of these materials (namely, the incredibly consistent molecules you can derive from them) makes traditional plastics predictable (in performance), durable, and long-lasting.

But some of these blessings can also be a curse. Here are the troubles with traditional plastics.

There’s nothing concerning in the basic definition of “plastic”. But the specific chemistry used to make traditional plastic has created two growing areas of concern:

1. Potential Toxicity
2. Long-Lasting Microplastics

Traditional plastic is a petroleum-derived material. Petroleum itself contains a number of nasty chemicals. And some of the helper chemicals (called “plasticizers”) used to make traditional plastic can also be problematic (that BPA you’re hoping is not in your water bottle is one such plasticizer).

Traditional plastic lasts a really long time. Durability is actually one of the core benefits of traditional plastic. But as plastic use has exploded, this blessing has become an environmental curse. Moreover, it means that when traditional plastic breaks down into small pieces (microplastics), those pieces can linger wherever they may end up – including in tissues throughout the body.

Microplastics are small pieces of plastic. They’re commonly defined as any piece of plastic smaller than 5mm (about 0.2 inches) in size, but they’re often much smaller, even invisible to the naked eye.

Microplastics are formed either directly/intentionally (e.g. microbeads used in cosmetics) or, more commonly, through the gradual breakdown of larger pieces of plastic.

They’re not an ingredient in plastic; they’re just small pieces of plastic.

The concerning feature of microplastics – at least, the ones formed from traditional plastics – is that they never really go away. They just get smaller.

For a microplastic to fully disappear, it needs to biodegrade. And traditional plastics (the ones made from petroleum-derived components) do not biodegrade. Instead – through a combination of UV radiation (which weakens and breaks the chemical bonds holding traditional plastics together), heat, and physical wear – traditional plastics just break down into smaller and smaller pieces over time.