You may be surprised to know that braces and Clear Aligners do much more than just straighten teeth; in fact, they also change your jawline, lips and overall facial profile. braces actually help a person to improve their facial features while enhancing your smile.
While it totally depends on your age to what extent the braces can affect your facial aspects, the tendency in children is much more than in adults due to the flexibility in facial muscles. When it comes to adult braces and clear aligners treatments, there might be some questions on how these orthodontic methods can affect an individual’s lips, jaws, nose and other facial features.
Can Clear Aligners Change Your Face Shape?
Yes, since Clear Aligners treatment also involves the process of teeth straightening, it works well to fix the facial alignment issues and gives you a more symmetrical and natural look to your mouth and jaw line.
How Do Braces Change a Person’s Face Shape?
A person’s appearance is most dramatically affected by the braces under these three orthodontic conditions.
Under bites- Under this condition, a person’s chin extends farther and looks too big for the face; but, after braces treatment, the jaw line does not extend further and allows a natural and softer look.
Over bites – Unlike under bites, people with an overbite appear to have no chin at all. For this condition, braces help to establish a stronger jaw line and provide a more visible and distinguished chin.
Open bites – An open bite is a problem in which the lips and mouth appear to be stretched out and the mouth cannot close naturally. For this particular problem, braces pull the teeth into a more vertical alignment and allow a patient to close the mouth naturally without needing to stretch the lips around angled teeth.
Do Braces Change the Shape of your Nose?
Another popular question people have when undergoing braces treatment is, “do braces change your nose shape?”
The Answer is NO. Although braces do adjust the width of your upper jaw, it does not affect the shape and size of your nose.
Do braces make your nose look bigger? As braces pull the upper teeth back significantly, there may be an illusion of a protruding nose, but the nose itself does not get bigger in size.
Do Braces Change your Lips?
Some people may ask “Do braces make your lips bigger?”, and the short answer is NO. Braces have nothing to do with changing your lips in terms of fullness and shape; however, there could be a light change in the position of your lips, given the change in the position of the teeth.
Lips serve as a protective barrier against your teeth so that whenever you get hit in the mouth, they’re not fractured.
Getting braces or Clear Aligners treatment will only change the base where your lips rest.
While wearing Traditional Metal Braces, you might feel that your lips are looking bigger, but it is only due to the extra width created by the braces between your teeth and lips and your lips can’t sit back against the teeth until braces come off.
Do Braces Change your Jawline?
Well, it again depends on the age of an individual. For a younger patient, it’s YES. The braces and other appliances can affect the shape and size of the growing jawlines but braces alone cannot change the jawline if you’re an adult.
Does Clear Aligners Change Face Shape?
Unlike braces, Clear Aligners has the tendency to change your lip size and facial profile in some circumstances. In fact, when Clear Aligners brings the upper teeth into a proper alignment, this can sometimes have an impact on the appearance of lips and side profile, but this change is not big enough to make a visible difference.
Understanding the relationship between orthodontic treatments and the impact they have on facial features is really important in order to make an informed decision about which specific treatment route to take.
