On your wedding day, the centerpiece of your beauty will be your smile. It’s how you show your joy, so make sure your teeth (and your lips!) look their best so that you look radiant in person and movie-star gorgeous in your photos.

Treating Your Teeth

Take a white piece of paper or white envelope and hold it up to your teeth as you look into a mirror with good lighting. If you’re like most people, the color difference will be startling. You’re used to your face, used to your smile, so you may not have noticed that your teeth are that dull, yellowed, or stained from wine, soda, tea, iced tea, cigarettes, certain fruits or foods, or just from age. On those makeover shows on television, one of the first things they do to their candidates is to whiten their teeth. It’s proven to make people look younger, and some would say happier. So check out your teeth right now, and make a plan for how you’ll whiten up your smile.

If your teeth are just a little bit stained, you might consider at-home products like Crest WhiteStrips or even whitening toothpastes that will improve your tooth color by two to three shades of white over the course of several weeks’ regular, routine applications. Or, if you need a more significant improvement to your tooth shade, visit a quality dentist to explore the options in professional bleaching applications that contain peroxides. Used with special laser lights, these treatments may be pricey (in the $500 to $700 range in some areas), but they can improve your tooth color by five to eight shades. That’s a big difference, and many brides say it’s worth the investment when they trust their dentists to use the newest technology to brighten their smiles. A good dentist will show you a color chart to give you the most realistic view of what you can expect from a whitening treatment. Keep in mind that you might not get the nuclear-white movie star tooth shading from some treatments, but that could be a good thing. Some dentists tell me that over-bleaching or getting too many laser treatments can turn your teeth a blue shade of white. Not the effect you’re after, so trust the advice of your dentist for any professional treatments.

As your wedding approaches, limit your intake of staining drinks or foods. (That blueberry pie isn’t very good for your diet, either!)

Kissable Lips

As for your lips, run your finger across them now. A little chapped? Not quite as soft as they can be for that first kiss as husband and wife? Find a terrific lip exfoliant product that contains either natural elements like nuts or gentle chemical salicylic acid, and exfoliate every night before applying a terrific lip moisturizer. While some beauty experts say that you can exfoliate your lips with a wet toothbrush, that could actually irritate sensitive skin and cause you to scrub off too much. So stick with a trusted brand’s lip treatment system, and start now for healthier-looking lips leading up to the wedding.

Perfect Lip Color

Healthy lips have a softness to them, all the better for the perfect lipstick and gloss application. But the key is the right shades of lipstick and gloss. As we’re sure you’re aware, some shades of lipstick make your teeth look whiter, and some make your teeth look more yellow. So experiment with colors to find your perfect shade of pink or deeper rose for a more natural daytime look, or a deeper rose for a dramatic nighttime look. Your makeup expert can advise on the best lip colors for your skin tone, and also to complement the color of your gown. Not all whites are the same, after all. Some whites are pure white, some have a more beige-y tone, and others have sub-hues of pink, yellow, even blue. When you put on certain lip colors, the undertone of your gown comes out, and you may find that your lips look wrong with the dress. So arm yourself with several shades of pink, nudes, rose, and other soft colors so that you can choose on your wedding day which kiss of color and gloss looks perfect on you in the moment.

The Groom’s Smile

His smile will be on display on the wedding day too, so encourage your groom to join you in tooth-whitening and lip-moisturizing treatments and routines. Look together for terrific men’s exfoliant and moisturizing products and perhaps you can visit the dentist together for His and Hers whitening treatments.

Sharon Naylor is the author of The Bride’s Gratitude Journal and 30 additional wedding books, www.sharonnaylor.net

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