Cure Bad Denture Breath

Don’t try this if there is any metal on your denture or the metal will turn black permanently. You shouldn’t do it if your denture has porcelain teeth also.

When I was practicing dentistry, sometimes a patient would come in with a denture concern and it would smell horribly. When I removed the denture and took it to my lab I would almost vomit from the smell. I will let you know what I did to totally remove the smell in one second for approximately ten cents. First, I want to explain a few things because of the metal problem.

Full dentures are made with acrylic (polymethylmethacrylate) for the pink or brown (it can be shaded for different pigment colors) area of the gums. The teeth can also be made of acrylic or maybe porcelain. Porcelain teeth are a little grittier on the chewing surface and they click loudly. Porcelain teeth have a brass stud hidden from view that the acrylic gums hang onto. This brass stud will corrode over time, but very fast if you clean the denture with my little shortcut so don’t do it.

Fill a cup with Clorox or it’s equivalent. It can be pure or it can be diluted up to 10%. You just need enough to splash around on the denture when you put it into the cup. Instantly all the bacteria are killed that caused the odor and you can rinse off the denture and it is smelling a little like Clorox and not the bacteria and fungus (yeast) that were growing on it.

The worst smelling dentures I would see were from folks never removing them (sometimes for years). The ideal would be to take them out when you are asleep and keep them wet in a denture bath or any container with water. The commercial cleansers aren’t essential, but they do a nice job. The minimum you should do to keep your denture clean is remove it at least once a day and use a denture brush or tooth brush and scrub all of it inside and out even if it is just with tap water and it should not ever get too bad in the odor department again.

Don’t let the denture dry out ever. When the acrylic of the denture dries out such as overnight, it often warps and can’t be used again. Leave it in a container with water or water plus a denture cleaner and rinse it in water in the morning and put it back in. Many folks leave the denture in all night. In that case you should clean it once a day as a minimum as I already described.

If you have a lisp with your denture that you never had before using this particular denture then you have a problem with how the denture was made and you should read my article about it. This is what I’ve noticed with several movie stars and narrators. You can hear the problem as soon as they say Mishishippi instead of Mississippi. In fact, that is what I used to have them say to test the denture as I was making it for them.

Cracking at the corners of your mouth with a moist pink area inside the crack is often caused by yeast living in the fold that might be caused by a denture which permits your mouth to close down a little too far. That might be something for another article in the future.