Beauty and Personal Grooming

Good oral hygiene ensures good health. And the best way to achieve this is to brush your teeth twice a day. Flossing is also as important as brushing to dislodge the impurities stuck in between the teeth. Along with brushing and flossing, cleaning your tongue is also highly necessary; it helps get rid of the white deposit that is a breeding ground for bacteria and other microbes. Rinsing your mouth really well after you eat is also crucial and you should never forget this habit. Following all these habits will also keep bad breath away. Now bad breath / halitosis is not just due to bad oral hygiene, it could also be a symptom of some other disease. Do read up on the various posts on bad breath ( Bad breath? Take these tests , Home remedies for bad breath ) and how to tackle it.  

With estimates placing victims of bad breath at anywhere between one third to nearly half of the world's population, the hygiene of your mouth may be more of a problem than you thought it was. Although notoriously difficult to detect until the embarrassing moment when someone tells you about it, you can fight off bad breath with these easy, preventative steps.

Bad breath can be a huge issue in anybody's life, especially if you have a very active social life. People don't want to face you if your breath has a foul odor.

Not very long ago, I had mentioned that I was down with cold and flu and I'd even written a post on how lemon grass tea helped me to soothe the symptoms. Apparently at that point of time, I had bad breath too. To be honest, I never had a chance of knowing about it until one of the neighbouring kids told me. Now  kids generally are known to be very forthright and blatant in telling you the hard facts on your face, be it a straggling hair peeking out of your nose , a stray hair on your chin or how awful you look in your new dress . Adults, on the other hand will go out of their way to conceal all sorts of things from you, all the while sneering at you or poking fun behind your back. In a way, it's good - knowing the truth I mean ... the kid's honesty actually let me know about my problem and I could do something about it.

Imagine this: You have a hot date and decided to pull out all the stops with this one—you're all dolled up, spent hours on in perfecting your hair, makeup, and nails. Your clothes hug your body in all the right places. You look like perfection. Everything is on point— that is, everything except for your horrendous breath. If you hope your date won't mind because everything else is flawless, think again. This is because according to research, the importance of dental hygiene and a clean fresh breath surpasses all other grooming habits such as a having brushed hair and fashionable clean clothes. The importance of dental hygiene even triumphs over the traditional romantic advances such as having lit candles, playing soft romantic music and dimming the lights in a room.

As 85 percent of bad breath originates in the mouth, simple treatment strategies like brushing teeth twice a day, flossing the spaces between 2 teeth, rinsing and gargling after every food intake, professional cleansing of the teeth by a dentist and treatment for oral diseases, especially gum diseases usually is necessary to tackle this problem. But in most cases an unclean tongue can be the culprit too. In fact, dentists suggest that brushing and flossing should be accompanied by tongue cleaning also in order to thoroughly cleanse your oral cavity. The bacterial count on your tongue can be drastically reduced (as much as 50% in one day) with effective tongue cleaning.

Bad breath (Halitosis) is due to a variety of reasons; oral bacteria , odoriferous foods, negligence of dental hygiene and smoking being the key ones. However the repercussions of bad breath are many. You lose out on relationships, friends and almost face social ostracization. And the sad part for you is that it’s tough to tell if you have vampire breath, because your sense of smell adapts to your own odours. But here are some ways to test your breath and determine how bad it is before everyone else does. The floss test: Work a strand of flavourless dental floss between your back molars and give it a whiff. If it smells like rotten eggs, then most certainly you have bad breath. The smell actually is from plaque , which is a thin film of microorganisms, which everybody has to some extent. But the stronger your plaque smells, the more likely it is your breath stinks too. Watch your tongue: Stick out your tongue. Do you clean it on a regular basis with a tongue scraper? If not,...

You must have observed some persons who behave queerly while conversing with others. They try to close their mouth with a hanky while talking, maintain a reasonable distance from the other person and are usually in a hurry to end the conversation. This peculiarity is immediately obvious to you. Knowing them to be otherwise confident and self-assured, you are left wondering as to what they are trying to hide. And then it dawns upon you that the reason for this abnormal behavior is bad breath. But it is no laughing matter when you are the sufferer and face such an embarrassing situation of bad breath, also known in medical parlance as ‘halitosis’.

Bad breath is a common problem and a cause for social embarrassment faced by majority of adults; in children it is comparatively rare. Very rarely will people tell the sufferer that he/she has it and the sufferers themselves may be quite unaware of it. One simple test that helps to detect it is to lick the back of your hand and sniff it. This puts your saliva and mouth odor under your nose and is a good guide to the state of your breath. Once bad breath is confirmed, the next step is treatment which will be based on the factors causing the same.