The first thing people notice isn’t the smile, it’s the braces. For many high school students with braces, they’re daily reality comes with sore teeth, tight wires, and the challenge of getting through the school day while adjusting to the pain. But for most of those students, the hope of a perfect smile makes the soreness easier to handle.

People might think that having braces is such a life changing feeling, but after you have them for a while you’ll see that the feelings don’t change much.

“It’s kind of just like they’re there,“ Senior Santiago Storey said. “It’s just like you live with them and after a while you don’t really realize they’re there.”

Having braces means cleaning your teeth takes longer since you have to rope your floss between every bracket, and brush your danger zones by themselves. So a way to make the process faster is getting a good electric tooth brush which is actually recommended and a water flosser instead of using regular floss.

Junior Mosley Williams, better known as Bj, feels like braces bring something to his appearance that nothing else could.

“I feel like they bring a different identity to my face,” Williams said. “They make me have a more clean look and make me look more mature, like a whole new person.”

Braces might do good things but there’s also negatives to them.

“There’s always food stuck in my teeth when I eat,” Junior Marwa Hadad said. “And when I sleep the brackets stick into my skin and make little indents inside my mouth.”

While braces have a nice outlook to them they do happen to give the people wearing them some bad pains.

“I know they are doing good things,” freshman Ryan Fournier said. “ And that they look good, but the pain is a lot and I hate getting them adjusted. It just hurts so bad.”

The worst part about having braces is the pain after they get tightened, and people who don’t or never had braces wouldn’t understand so here’s how Freshman Adina Catic explained the pain she has been receiving.

“I just got them tightened today,” Catic said. “And I genuinely have constant poking in my mouth, and it doesn’t feel good they don’t feel nice at all”

Yes, having braces comes with plenty of cons, like the pains, and getting things stuck in your teeth but they also have pros that come with them too.

“I love the color switches I get to do,” Williams said. “My favorite color to get on them is turquoise.”

There are many different kinds of braces, while metal braces are the most common kind of them there’s still other material braces out there in the world.

“I have ceramic braces,” Freshman Jesse Lucatorta said. “There really is no difference between metal and ceramic besides the fact that they make your teeth go straight faster.”

When you first get your braces they are going to hurt and they might even poke a little, but the best advice I have for that is to eat things cold like ice cream, or even just drink cold water, and don’t forget they provide you with wax and the school nurse also has wax too help with the poking.

Braces come with pains, so be ready for any and every new feeling they withhold.

“Prepare yourself for the pain that comes when you first get them,” Williams said. “Have your tylenol on stand by.”

When you get your braces your teeth won’t be able to function how they used to, so don’t be scared just take all the advice you can get to make the process easier.

“Have a bunch of soft food in your fridge,” Catic said.” Get food you will be able to just swallow instead of chew because you won’t really be able to chew at first.”

No matter what you do after you get braces you need to make sure you listen to what your orthodontist says.

“If they give you rubber bands, wear them,” Storey said. “Its just going to extend the process if you don’t wear them.”

Getting something new added to your braces will feel different, but all you need to do is calm down and give yourself the time to adjust to the new feelings happening in your mouth.

“I wear bands all the time unless I’m eating,” Fournier said. “And they don’t really hurt, they just feel weird until you forget you’re wearing them.”

With every set a braces is a different mouth that has different pain levels. So just because one person doesn’t think something is painful the next person might have a different opinion on the feeling.

“I absolutely hate bands,” Williams said. “That was the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life, and I never want them again.”

There are many tips and tricks to having braces but the tip that I always give people is when they adjust your wire, move your mouth around a lot and even try to say a few sentences to make sure there’s no poking or pain going on in your mouth.