Mia Torres

Contributor at Smile Without the Chair

About

Freelance graphic designer. Thirty-six years old. Denver, Colorado. Dental anxiety has been part of my life since I was eight, longer than it has not been.

The filling at eight went wrong somehow. I still cannot tell you exactly what happened, whether it was the anesthetic or just a kid who could not sit still through a drill, only that something about it rewired how my body reacts to a dental chair. Through most of my twenties I made appointments and cancelled them, sometimes the morning of, until I stopped making them at all. Close to a decade went by that way. It caught up with me eventually: two root canals, back to back, and a stretch of standing in the parking lot outside the office telling myself I could still turn around and go home, before I finally walked in for the first one.

Home care became the actual subject of this site somewhere in the middle of all that. About eight years now of testing every toothpaste, gadget, and questionable natural remedy I could get my hands on, mostly because going back for routine care was still not something I could make myself do on any kind of schedule. These days I only go in for genuine emergencies, and I have built a home routine sturdy enough that those emergencies are rare. My friend Solange, who I met years ago at a branding agency and who is just as unfiltered about her own fear as I am about mine, was the one who first pushed me toward a water flosser. She was right about it, and she still brings that up.

What I bring to this is eight years of paying close attention: to what actually changes something and what just sounds like it should, and to a fear that has never fully gone away no matter how many products I have tried. No dental degree sits behind any of it. I write about both the wins and the things that quietly failed, because somebody reading this while dreading their own next appointment does not need another list that pretends everything works.

Articles by Mia Torres

Disclosure

Some of the links in my reviews earn me a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I am not going to recommend something that does not work to people who already have enough to deal with. If a product let me down, the review says so.