Should I superglue my denture as a temporary measure?
Imagine you’re on holiday, enjoying a nice, big, juicy steak and you hear a sudden small crack from your mouth. You swallow your steak, but your denture is now floating around in your mouth. You take it out, and it sits there looking very sorry for itself in two pieces. What do you do? You’ve still got 5 days left of your holiday and no dental insurance! What can you put it back together with? Thankfully, you always have some handy superglue in your suitcase so you superglue the two pieces together. Fantastic, you’ve got your denture back in one piece. But at what cost?
And just so you know, his happens more than you’d think!
Not the snapping of dentures! Honestly, you should see the way the technicians quite literally hammer them out of the flasks of plaster when making them! But home repairs with glue.
For one, you’re putting an extremely toxic adhesive in your mouth. It will most likely irritate your gums and the soft tissues in your mouth and may cause a very bad infection.
Secondly, even though superglue is a type of acrylic (which is the same stuff that the pink part of your denture is made from), it does not like denture acrylic. It will actually slowly destroy it. The longer its left on, the worse it will get, and the harder it will be to repair. Most of the time, dentures that have been super glued cannot be repaired, or at least, not very easily, and it is extremely difficult to not only remove all the super glue residue, but to then try and fit the pieces back together, if at all.
The glue will also make the denture incredibly brittle, which will make it more prone to another break in the future.
It will also only go back together along the lines of the superglue, and not the denture. So it probably won’t fit all that great either.
We recommend that everyone has a spare set of dentures, just in case one of them breaks. This will prevent you having to use something to glue them back together temporarily, and therefore forcing your hand into needing a new pair. Our lab can 95% of the time easily repair a broken denture within 24 hours, so just give us a call and drop off your denture. Otherwise, it’s a minimum of 4 weeks to make a new set from scratch.
So please, don’t use super glue on your dentures. It’ll save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
For more information on dentures, please visit: https://halesowen.mywhitehousedental.co.uk/treatment/dentures/