Tooth Erosion

The goal of our project is to examine the effect of certain everyday substances on our teeth. The substances that we used are orange and lemon juices, milk, cola, hydrochloric acid, apple vinegar, mouthwash, and artificial lemon juice. The teeth we used were extracted and given to us by dentists. We put the teeth into these substances, left them for eight days, and examined the results. We took progress pictures of them every day. It turned out that some teeth have changed their color and size while others stayed the same. The teeth with the most noticable difference between day one and day eight were those which have stayed in the hydrochloric acid and cola. The hydrochloric acid was used to represent stomach acid that would affect the teeth after regurgitation. The one we used had a concentration of ten percent, which is twenty times more than the stomach acid’s, but we can assume that it would be twenty times as effective.