I’m interested to read about your experiences with Invisalign or other clear tray aligners (tray-style braces), especially in adulthood. Thanks.
I did Invisalign in 2024 - a nine month process. It helped my crossbite. I lost a lot of weight during the process because I didn’t snack or drink soda between meals.
My wife used Invisalign about 8 years ago and she has been extremely happy with the results. She is very diligent about wearing her retainer at night and her teeth have remained straight since she completed the treatment.
Same. My late wife did Invisalign 20-25 years ago (while she was healthy) and had good results.
I had quite scraggly very crowded lower front teeth and slightly overlapped slightly crowded upper front teeth. I Invisaligned both uppers and lowers at the same time in about 2019-2020. The results were excellent. They weren’t false teeth perfect, but they weren’t expected to be. I went from standard UK scraggly to standard American nice looking.
Negligible discomfort. Needed to visit the dentist every 2-3 weeks (I forget) for a new set of incrementally straighter aligners. All told I went through 24 sets over most of a year. At first I found going to sleep with those things in my mouth kinda difficult. A week later it felt weird to sleep without them.
As mentioned, the temptation to snack is greatly reduced, which is a nice side effect. Likewise sipping on coffee, tea, or soda all day.
Once the process is done, you’ll be wearing a last set of maintenance aligners at night forever. Or at least until you’re old enough you don’t care how your teeth shift. I’m not that old yet.
I know you asked for adult experiences, and I can’t help you there.
My son needs dental corrections and we completed “phase 1” this spring. Phase 2 will wait until he’s further along in his teenage development.
Our orthodontist didn’t use Invisalign but rather used this device, a “PUL”. It was a single device that was incrementally adjustable over the space of a little under a year to address a combination of overbite and jaw misalignments (though his teeth were fairly straight). The results were incredible.
He had several friends using Invisalign around the same timeframe. Every single one of them accidentally threw out at least one set with their lunches (though that speaks more to my son’s overall usage compliance and discipline!).
We don’t know yet if he’ll get braces or Invisalign for phase 2, it’ll depend on measurements once testosterone has had a chance to do it’s thing to his jawline!
And that reversion happens with a quickness. My son finished his aligners and neglected his nighttime retainer use and within a few weeks you could already tell. Our primary reason for having gone through it was to get a trapped canine to drop and that happened. So it’s annoying that his teeth are already shifting but magazine-perfect teeth were never the goal to start.
The reason I had scraggly teeth until about age 60 was my utter unwillingness as a tween / teen to comply with any orthodontia regimen whatsoever after the first week of discomfort with a night headgear thing pulling on two molars.
To the doc’s credit back then, he had a clear convo w parents and I that the process would be a total waste unless I was diligent. Dad looked at me, I looked at Dad and said “Forget it; I’m happy with my teeth.” And so he avoided wasting a bunch of money and I avoided the discomfort of old-fashioned braces. At the cost of scraggly teeth for another 50 years.
I had traditional braces from 13-15, and then had a permanent retainer on my bottom teeth until 1-2 years after I got my wisdom teeth removed.
Fast forward 20 years and my bottom teeth started moving again until I told the dentist I wanted to do something about it. I got a series of retainers to wear for some weeks. At the end he mounted another permanent retainer behind the middle 6 teeth at the bottom. That was more than 10 years ago. No issue for a head MRI (for my ears) or surgery where I was intubated.
I had traditional braces as a teenager. It took forever (about 5 years), probably because I wasn’t diligent about wearing the rubber bands at first. Then after two years of no progress, the orthodontist basically said I was never going to get them off if I didn’t get better with wearing the bands. So I did.
But then after my treatment I never wore my retainer, and my teeth shifted (as they inevitably do). Eventually I developed an annoying gap between my lower right molars that always trapped food. And my dentist told me my bite was off to the point that I was damaging the enamel on my teeth. So I finally decided to get the Invisalign treatment.
It took about two years (about twice as long as originally predicted), but that was mainly because I wore each set of trays about twice as long as I was supposed to. (After all, I was in no hurry, and I had trouble reaching the 20+ hours per day you were supposed to wear them. Seeing a pattern here? 
)
Anyway, I eventually got there. I’m mostly satisfied with the results. My bite was still a bit off when they said they were done. But close enough that my bite would actually adjust over the course of a single day. For that reason I discovered it was important to get my retainer made in the afternoon, not the morning. Also you get a better final retainer with a traditional impression, not the scanning tool they use for Invisalign. (So basically my final permanent retainer was a clear plastic device similar to but different than Invisalign.)
I am very diligent about wearing my retainer. They say anyone who gets teeth correction needs to wear a retainer as long as you want your teeth to stay straight. Meaning forever. I wish my first orthodontist had made that more clear. (Or maybe he did, and I ignored him.)
Would I get Invisalign if had to do it over again? Probably not. Wearing the trays all day was a real pain in the neck. You can’t eat or drink anything other than water with them in, and you then have to brush your teeth before putting them back on. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably go with traditional braces.
I did Invisalilgn a few years ago to straighten some bottom teeth that were starting to go crooked. Worked fine. I wear the retainer at night two or so nights a week. Seems to be enough to keep things in line.
May I ask how many trays that took?
I did 36 weeks - so 18 sets of trays (the trays I used were for 2 weeks each).
I still have the monitoring app on my phone so I can say that my teen’s took from June 15, 2024 to February 10, 2026 and comprised 36 sets of aligners.
Often, he went an extra day or so before we got his scan in so maybe shave 15% off that time off if you’re more diligent about getting your scans in on time.
What scans are you referring to?
(I got just three scans: one at the beginning for my first 14 sets of trays, then another before my second set of 12 trays, then one at the end.)
That was my experience as well. I forget the exact number of trays, but the scans amounted to before, middle, and after.
My kid (I keep saying that but, for reference, he’s 15 with adult teeth) was given a plastic gizmo to fit into his mouth once every 4-5 days and a phone app. You would use the app to photograph your teeth with and without the aligner, the orthodontist (or someone) would review and you’d get the go ahead to move to the next set of aligners or else be told to stay on your current ones. Because of the regular app scans and monitoring, we only had to have two or three in-person visits over the course of the treatment.
To expand on this, the above might not sound like a big deal, but you have to do this every day for the whole treatment. So not just when you’re at work or around the house, but also when you’re doing activities or on vacation. I remember it being particularly inconvenient on long hikes, bike rides, and skiing. And I didn’t even try doing wearing my trays while scuba diving because it seemed way too risky.
I’m a pretty active person, so all those hours not wearing my trays when I was supposed to added up and extended my treatment.
I also lost about six or eight weeks when I had a devastating shoulder injury and subsequent surgery. I was in agony and wearing my trays was the last thing on my mind for a while there.
I DIDN’T have Invisalign, and in fact, it did not exist when I had orthodontia in the 1970s
Just out of curiosity, during a visit last year, I did casually ask my dentist if I could have had it as an alternative to my childhood braces, and she told me to explain exactly what I’d had done.
I’d had my bottom teeth straightened with a device like a retainer, but I’d had braces on my top teeth that not only straightened my crowded front teeth (which had come in early), but supported headgear that fixed a very serious overbite (like, Guinness book-sized).
Verdict was that Invisalign could have corrected my bottom teeth, but not fixed my bite, and my bite was probably the primary concern-- straightening my teeth was “merely” cosmetic, and might not have been done if I weren’t already there for my bite; correcting my bite probably helped some health problems I’d been having, and was the reason reason my GP, not my dentist, made the original referral (something that always puzzled me). Also, the reason I’d had braces fairly young. (Originally evaluated at 9, but didn’t get them until 11, because we were in the Soviet Union the year I was 10.)
Now, all the adults in the picture are gone, and so are probably any records of the case, so I don’t know for sure.
But for your information gathering, there’re some things Invisalign can’t do, and here is an example.
I knew someone who took them in and out to snack, and did not brush her teeth, or even rinse out her mouth before putting the back in.
She had really foul breath.
I figured it had something to do with the trays, but didn’t put it together with not brushing before putting them back in.
Really foul. And not just sitting next to her, but at a table, even several chairs away. Someone probably should have clued her in, but I didn’t know her well enough myself.
This was really remarkably bad though. If I had to recall the 10 most foul-breathed people I’d ever met, she’d be on the list, and I’m almost 60.
Nice person, though, so it was really a shame.
Our kid’s orthodontist explained that (as I recall) systems like Invisalign work best if teeth need to be pushed outward and separated and systems like braces work best when teeth need to be pulled together. I doubt that’s in stone and it’s case by case but he said it as part of why our kid was a good candidate for it. We walked in, children of the 70s-80s, assuming that it would be braces but it turned out that aligners was the better solution for his ills anyway since he needed his teeth pushed outward to make room for the non-dropping canine.