I can tell a woman’s age the second she smiles. And no, it isn’t the wrinkles that give her away...

I’ll say it, because nobody else will.

I can usually tell a woman’s age the second she smiles.

Not from the lines around her eyes.

Not from her neck.

Not from the gray she pays good money to cover every six weeks.

It’s her teeth.

I know how awful that sounds.

But pull up a picture from your last family get-together and look closely.

The woman with the brighter smile almost always looks younger than the woman beside her with beautiful skin and teeth that have gone a little dull or yellow.

I didn’t really notice this until I started noticing it on myself.

A few months ago, somebody sent me a picture from a birthday dinner.

My hair looked good.

My makeup looked good.

For once, I even liked the way my face looked.

Then I smiled.

And all I could see were my teeth.

They weren’t terrible.

They just looked... older.

A little yellower than they used to.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Your Teeth Change More Than You Realize

I found out that there is a boring biological reason for this.

The outside of a tooth is covered in enamel.

Underneath that enamel is dentin, which is naturally more yellow.

As we get older, enamel can become thinner and more translucent, which lets more of that warmer color underneath show through.

Then add thirty or forty years of coffee, tea, red wine and everything else we put in our mouths.

It adds up.

And the strange part is that we spend so much time worrying about every other sign of aging.

We buy the serum.

We color the gray.

We spend a ridiculous amount of money on our hair.

Then we smile for a picture and realize the thing aging us most might be the one thing we’ve barely thought about.

That was me.

I started doing that closed-mouth smile without realizing it.

If somebody took a picture, I would look at my teeth before I looked at anything else.

And apparently, I wasn’t imagining the effect.

Researchers Have Actually Studied This

A few years ago, I came across a study where researchers altered the appearance of people’s teeth in pictures and asked participants to rate the faces.

The faces stayed the same.

The teeth changed.

When the teeth looked yellower, the faces were rated less favorably.

What really caught my attention was that the effect was stronger when people were looking at women’s faces.

That was the moment I thought:

Well, great.

Another thing nobody warns you about.

But there was something encouraging buried in the same research.

Making teeth extremely white didn’t seem to give people some enormous extra advantage.

The bigger difference was simply between teeth that looked yellowed and teeth that looked naturally brighter.

That mattered to me.

Because I had no interest in having glowing white television teeth.

I didn’t want a different smile.

I wanted mine to look a little more like it did ten years ago.

The Problem Was Everything I Had Already Tried

I had tried the drugstore strips.

More than once.

I would use them for a few days, tell myself I was finally going to stick with it this time, and then my teeth would start getting sensitive.

Cold water hurt.

Coffee hurt.

Eventually the box would end up in the bathroom drawer with three or four strips left in it.

I had also looked at professional whitening.

Then I saw what dentists were charging.

And it turns out most in-office whitening uses peroxide too, usually at a much higher strength than the strips.

If four days of drugstore strips made my teeth ache, I had no interest in paying hundreds of dollars for a stronger dose.

That ended that idea fairly quickly.

And I was not interested in rubbing lemon juice or baking soda all over my teeth because somebody on the internet said it worked.

So I more or less gave up.

I figured whitening was one of those things I would keep meaning to do and never actually do.

Until a routine dental cleaning changed that.

What My Hygienist Quietly Told Me

I was sitting in the chair at my dentist’s office when my hygienist asked if I had been whitening my teeth.

I laughed.

“I’ve tried,” I told her. “Every time I buy those strips, I make it about four days before my teeth start screaming at me.”

She knew exactly what I meant.

Apparently, I was far from the only woman who had complained about it.

Then she said something that made me stop her.

“There is something else people are starting to use.”

I asked what she meant.

She hesitated for a second, then told me she probably was not supposed to start recommending specific products while I was sitting in the chair.

Which, naturally, made me want to know even more.

She told me about a whitening powder some of her patients had been using.

No strips. No trays. No blue light.

And, most importantly to me, no hydrogen peroxide.

You just put a little on your toothbrush and brush with it.

I honestly thought she was talking about one of those charcoal powders that were everywhere a few years ago.

She shook her head.

This was different.

The ingredient doing the whitening was something called PAP+, a peroxide-free whitening ingredient designed to work on stains without relying on hydrogen peroxide.

Then she mentioned something else that really got my attention.

Hydroxyapatite.

It is a mineral found naturally in tooth enamel, and this powder includes it in the formula alongside the whitening ingredient.

Considering I had just spent several nights reading about how enamel changes as we get older, that was the part I remembered.

She wrote the name down for me before I left.

And yes, I looked it up the minute I got home.

The $30 Powder My Hygienist Told Me About

It is called PurelyWhite Deluxe.

And the more I read, the more I understood why she had brought it up.

It was not another complicated whitening “system.”

There were no strips to leave on for half an hour. No trays. No gel syringes. No blue light sitting on the bathroom counter.

It was a powder.

Wet your toothbrush, dip it in, and brush the way you already brush your teeth.

That was it.

What interested me most, though, was what was actually inside the jar.

The whitening ingredient is PAP+, which is used as a peroxide-free alternative in a growing number of whitening products.

That mattered to me because hydrogen peroxide was the reason I kept abandoning whitening products in the first place.

Then there was the hydroxyapatite my hygienist had mentioned.

Hydroxyapatite is a mineral found naturally in teeth, and it has become increasingly common in oral-care products.

PurelyWhite combines it with the whitening ingredients rather than making this nothing more than a stain-removing powder.

There is also CPC, an ingredient you may recognize from mouthwash, included for fresher breath.

None of that would have mattered very much to me if using the thing was a nuisance.

Thankfully, it isn’t.

I keep the jar next to my toothpaste.

I wet my toothbrush, dip the bristles lightly into the powder, and brush.

No timer. No strips sliding around my teeth. No sitting on the couch with a plastic tray in my mouth.

And no separate whitening appointment to remember.

It simply became part of something I was already doing every morning and night.

That, more than anything, is why I think I actually stuck with it.

Because I have bought plenty of “easy” beauty products over the years that somehow turned into another job.

This wasn’t one of them.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Years Ago

There was another thing I had to get out of my head.

I had always assumed whitening meant trying to get that unnaturally bright, almost-blue television smile.

I didn’t want that.

I am 57 years old. I do not need teeth that look like they were installed yesterday.

I just wanted to stop seeing yellow every time I smiled in a picture.

And that goes back to the study I mentioned earlier.

There did not appear to be some enormous reward for making teeth whiter and whiter.

The noticeable difference was between teeth that looked yellowed and teeth that looked naturally brighter.

That is a much more reasonable goal.

I did not need a different smile.

I wanted mine back.

A Few Things You Should Know Before You Try It

PurelyWhite Deluxe is a cosmetic whitener for natural teeth.

That means it cannot whiten crowns, veneers, fillings or other dental restorations the way it may affect natural tooth staining.

And if you have an existing dental problem, irritated gums, significant sensitivity or anything else going on in your mouth, talk to your dentist before changing what you use.

I would also ignore anyone who promises that every person is going to get the exact same result.

Teeth are different. Stains are different. What you eat and drink is different. How consistently you use something matters too.

So no, I am not going to tell you that one scoop magically gives every woman a movie-star smile.

That is not why I am writing this.

I am writing it because for years I thought my choices were basically:

Apparently, there was another option sitting in a little jar that I had never heard of until my hygienist quietly wrote the name down for me.

And It Costs About $30

This was the part that made the decision easy for me.

A jar is around $30.

Not $300. Not $600.

Around thirty dollars.

And the company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So I looked at it this way:

I had spent more than that on whitening strips I never finished.

I had spent more than that on serums that ended up pushed to the back of a drawer.

And I have certainly spent more than that at a salon without thinking twice about it.

For something I could add to a routine I was already doing twice a day, it felt like a very small experiment.

Especially when the thing bothering me every time I looked at a picture was sitting right in the middle of my face.

If This Article Made You Angry

Some of you probably read the headline, looked at my picture and decided you could not stand me.

Fair enough.

“I can tell a woman’s age the second she smiles” is not exactly the sort of sentence that makes you friends.

But I wrote it because once I noticed it, I could not stop noticing it.

We can spend hundreds of dollars trying to soften every line on our faces.

We color the gray. We buy the serum. We find the lighting.

Then somebody takes a picture, we smile, and suddenly the one thing we have barely thought about becomes the first thing we see.

For me, it was never about trying to look 25 again.

I don’t.

And I don’t particularly want to.

I just got tired of seeing a smile that looked older than the rest of me.

If you feel the same way, PurelyWhite Deluxe is worth looking into.

Especially if whitening strips have spent more time sitting unfinished in your bathroom drawer than they ever spent on your teeth.

You can see the current price and availability below.