Smiling With Confidence + cariPRO Ultrasonic Electric Toothbrush Giveaway!
Back on January 1st I wrote a post about some things I wanted to intentionally focus and work on this year. One of those things was boosting my self-confidence. I recently took a personal assessment at work that took a deep dive into our personality traits and gave us the framework for self-understanding and development. It was a 4 hour course that was so insightful and thoroughly explained all of the different personality types, and it felt very timely taking this course within the first week of 2019. During the last half of the course we were given our personality profiles and to be honest, it was scary how spot-on mine was! I felt like I was reading a novel about myself; the details were so exact and it was truly eye-opening to read through my strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for growth.
Speaking of weaknesses, it didn’t surprise me that lack of confidence was on there, stating that “she tends to take the things she does well for granted and usually underrates and understates herself.” Wow. Reading that statement resonated with me so deeply, and I suppose it’s something I haven’t given much thought to before. This exercise further confirmed my desire to not only give myself more credit than I normally do, but to be confident in myself and who God created me to be.
In that blog post I talked about some areas I’m focusing on to help build my confidence, such as working out to improve my posture, and improving on my public speaking skills, but perhaps something that I feel comes before either of those things is being proud of and confident in my smile. After all, it’s one of the first things people see what they talk to you! And if I’m being honest, it’s something that I’ve lost a bit of confidence in over the last several years.
I wore braces for a little over a year in middle school, and I felt great after that! My teeth didn’t need to be corrected too much, just my jaw alignment and my bottom row of teeth that were a little crooked. During my last appointment where I got to take my retainers home, the hygienist told my 14-year-old self that I really only needed to wear my retainer for a couple years after getting the braces off and my teeth would stay straight for life. What was my response to that? SWEEET! And that’s exactly what I did—I stopped wearing my retainer nightly after a couple years, and only wore it when I felt like it, which was maybe a couple nights a week at best. I didn’t start to see a noticeable change in my teeth until maybe 3-4 years ago, when my bottom teeth started shifting back to how they were pre-braces. I’m totally kicking myself because a) my parents spent a lot of money for me to get braces in the first place, and now it looks like I never even had them at all, and b) now I’m self-conscious about how my bottom teeth look.
I eventually want to get braces again, perhaps Invisalign or something similar, but in the meantime what I can focus on is the overall health of my mouth and teeth, which is why I’m so excited to tell you about the cariPRO Ultrasonic electric toothbrush from Smile Brilliant I’ve been using this month! I had used an Oral B electric toothbrush starting in middle school and all the way up through college and really enjoyed it. My teeth felt really healthy, and I’ve never had a cavity to this day (knock on wood!) and I feel like a lot of that is attributed to using an electric toothbrush for 10+ years. After college I suppose laziness took over and I reverted to my manual toothbrush, and have been using that for about the last 5-ish years. Over the last few months I was talking to Freddy about wanting to invest in another electric toothbrush, and when Smile Brilliant reached out it was honestly perfect timing and I was so excited to try theirs out!
When I received the cariPRO, Ultrasonic the first thing I noticed is that it has 5 brush modes (clean, white, massage, gum care, and sensitive)—all of them are great! I’ve been using the “clean” mode 4 times a week and “white” 3 times a week. I also alternate between massage and gum care because let’s face it, I’m not the best flosser in the world, so these modes help me feel like I’m giving my gums some TLC when I don’t feel like flossing. I also like that it has a 2 minute timer built into all modes, and 30 second intervals to remind you to move to a different quadrant of the mouth. This has really helped me make sure I’m brushing for the full 2 minutes, because I know for a fact that I wasn’t doing that with a manual toothbrush! The only thing I was skeptical of in the beginning was that it doesn’t have a round, rotating brush head like I was used to with the Oral B toothbrush. But after several days of using the cariPRO Ultrasonic I was already used to the brush head and my teeth looked and felt so much cleaner!
After the first couple days my gums were definitely sensitive because they weren’t used to the deep clean that an electric toothbrush provides, but after using it for two weeks straight my teeth look and feel so much cleaner, whiter and healthier overall! I’m really excited to continue using the cariPRO Ultrasonic this year—I know it’s going to be a game changer in helping me boost my self-confidence and embrace my unique smile! If you’re ready to start the new year with a beautiful, healthy smile too, follow the link here to enter to win a cariPRO Ultrasonic electric toothbrush from Smile Brilliant! If you don’t end up winning, use my code “blushfulbelle20” to get 20% off the cariPRO Ultrasonic electric toothbrushes :) I know you’ll love it as much as I do!
