My brother and I just discovered that we got opposite advice from our dental hygienists. Is it beneficial to use a long piece of floss and to advance it every few teeth, or does dislodged stuff stay dislodged?
I have never heard any advice that contradicts this.
I just went looking for something like “official” instructions on how to floss at the ADA website. There’s a cool little video you can watch, but dig this: while it says you should pull off about 18 inches of floss and wrap it around your fingers so that you’re actually only using about 1 inch of it at a time, it never actually says to advance it so that you use a different part of the floss as you go around the mouth.
I think that’s an oversight, though.
My dentist told me to advance the floss a little on each tooth to avoid taking the stuff you got out and then jamming back into a different place.
I cannot see how using “new” floss on each tooth really helps any. After I floss I rinse with Listerine so I can’t see how it would make a difference even if it did which I don’t think it does.
I keep a piece square of toilet paper handy and wipe off the floss after there’s stuff on it. Tooth gunk smells gross and I don’t like getting it on my hands. When I just advance the floss without wiping, I can smell it when I bring my hands back up to my mouth to move to the next tooth and it makes me gag a little.
I believe you underestimate how deep the pockets around your teeth can be, but I’m not an expert, so I won’t try to explain it.
I thought everybody knew the correct way to get gunk off the floss is to pluck the floss so the gunk ends up on the bathroom mirror. Don’t you people know anything?
I rinse it off under a stream of water after every tooth, but still advance it every other tooth or so. I have really tightly spaced teeth, so I can’t do more than three or four “tooth gaps” before the floss is too shredded to use anyway
I can’t be bothered with any of this, I like those disposable little flossers and a tissue (yeah yeah, plastic, I know…).
I don’t think it’s absolutely mandatory, but I certainly advance, not because anyone told me to, but because it is obviously useful. Besides the issue of redepositing debris (which can be solved by sucking/licking the debris off the floss), the main issue is simply that floss does not have great endurance - it starts fraying after relatively short use. I think having too much “slime” on a particular piece may also diminish the useful amount of friction.