Braces making teeth small & smile lopsided

[kbrown6245]

My teeth are becoming VERY small on one side- you can hardly even see them anymore. This is resulting in my smile looking lopsided since my teeth are much bigger on one side. The issue is with the lateral incisor and the canine. I don't know if that have be intruded too much or what but I hope it can be fixed because it looks awful. Has anyone else experienced this? I'm only 9 months into treatment but I feel like this shouldn't be happening. Any advice on what to do? It's really bothering me. I liked my "bigger" teeth. I'll post pictures once I have permission

[Aspiring]

You can post a link to something like Photobucket without waiting for full permissions to kick in.

How are your gums? If they are inflamed, they will be puffy and cover more of the tooth. Long-term, it can lead to gingival hypertrophy (fancy way of saying your gums grow too big) and cover them even more. Hypertrophy will persist even after the inflammation is resolved. The only way to correct it is through gum recontouring (after of course resolving the cause of inflammation).

Do the bottoms (biting surface) of your teeth line up, or are those two teeth much higher than the others?

Remember that the brackets are taking up space on your teeth, and once they are off your teeth will look bigger than they do now.

[kbrown6245]

Here's a picture of before braces/with braces. I'm honestly not sure if my gums are inflamed or not but I have a dentist appointment on tuesday so I'll just ask them.

[Aspiring]

It does look like it's your gumline that has changed more than your teeth. In both the before and current pictures, the bottoms of your top teeth look like the pretty much follow your bottom lip. In the before, you have little gum tissue showing between your teeth and your upper lip, especially on your right side (photo left). In the current picture, there is a lot of gum there.

[TennesseeSLP]

This is happening with my teeth after 1.5 yrs with braces. My front teeth look half the size because the gumline is coming down to the brackets almost. How did yours turn out? I notice this post was about 2 yrs ago.