By Kelly Day–

The Evils of Floss

Every person on Earth has heard it.  Dentists say it to each patient every visit.

“Floss more.”

The concept of flossing sounds easy enough.  You pull a 6-inch mint-coated string between your teeth to clean out whatever stubborn ick decided to reside there.  The reasons for flossing are quite good.

Flossing removes bacteria, prevents infection, which could ultimately prevent heart disease, stroke, and low birth weight, helps keep your teeth in your mouth, and keeps the sticky spinach from interfering on that first date.

But flossing also doesn’t make a lot of sense.  First of all, it’s painful.  I’ve had dentists who’ve flossed my teeth so hard it felt as though they wanted to raise the gum line up to my nostrils and down my chin.

To get the full benefits, one must push this surprisingly sharp string up and under the gums, wiggle around, then move on to the next tooth, where the process is repeated, until you’re too sore to close your mouth.  When flossing, it’s actually a good thing to make your gums bleed, because that signals that you’re doing it right.  Does that make sense?

My logic is, if it hurts, stop.  If it bleeds, stop.  If your dentist still wants you to do this, pretend you did.

Braces complicate everything.  Talking, eating, kissing (not that I would know), and of course, flossing.  There have been several technological breakthroughs to help solve this pressing issue.

Such inventions include the floss threader-a flimsy plastic needle with an enlarged eye where you thread the floss.  Then, you proceed to push the entire threader under the wire (be sure to not get it between wires should you have multiple ones) until it has gone all the way through and there is nothing but floss under the wire.

Continue to floss and repeat the exercise until all areas have been reached.  One unpleasant setback is that while pushing the threader through, it tends to become rather hard to maneuver, and may be more of a negative than a positive.

It is not uncommon for a threader to end up poking the underside of a lip.  Nor has it been unknown for a threader to explore the inner parts of a nostril.  And trust me-unless you’re five- you don’t want to put that back in your mouth.

Another super-fix for flossing troubles is “Super Floss.”  Though not a classic comic book hero, or any for that matter, “Super Floss” has ridded the braced and normal mouths of men and women alike of greasy bits of dinner that didn’t quite make it to the doggy bag.

“Super Floss” is composed of three sections to one pre-cut piece: First is the thick floss.  Thick floss is a firmer, short section of floss which can be used to get the floss guided to where it’s supposed to be, without wasting a threader.  The second section is the fluffy floss.  This area can be used to get the basics that stick to fronts of teeth, such as that nasty spinach we referred to earlier.

The third and final (though not at all the least important) section would be the regular floss, used for-you guessed it-regular flossing!  Like all nifty inventions, this has setbacks, also.

The thick floss has the same issues as the threader mentioned above.  The fluffy floss begins to slowly unravel itself and gets to be rather irritating to use.  And the whole thing gets so overused during the course of one flossing that it just becomes covered in saliva and rendered completely useless.

The ineffectiveness of the tools is not the only reason that I detest flossing.  Other than the fact that it’s wasteful and time-consuming, whenever I attempt to floss something always goes horribly wrong.

Once while flossing I pulled too hard up and caused my gums to bleed for what seemed three days straight, of course I’m a writer, so it’s my job to be overly dramatic.

I’ve also had experiences where the tiny threads that make up a strand of floss have so very inconveniently gotten caught on a bracket.  Silly, inattentive me didn’t notice and continued pulling the floss, until the whole affair became one giant tangled mess.  Not to mention drool.

When you hold your mouth open for extended periods of time in a downward position, especially when you have braces, you drool.  A lot.

While flossing, I become so absorbed in the flossing and my thoughts that I have no idea a tiny pool is forming beneath my chin.  Then my niece and bathroom mate, Ashley, point out the scene with a grimace and “Ew.”

And I proceed to further make myself look stupid by wiping away all the massive amounts of drool with my sleeve.  As fun as this sounds, it’s not.

Flossing is viewed as a simple and mandatory way to keep up good oral hygiene.  But in the real world under actual circumstances, it really isn’t.

And no matter how often you floss, it’s never enough.  For Lent I decided to floss every night.  The next dentist appointment, she complimented me on my pretty choice of band colors and my eyeglasses.

But floss more; always floss more.

Kelly Elizabeth Day is a sophomore at Smithson Valley High School in Comal Independent School District.