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Even if you’ve never had a halitosis problem, bad breath is probably something you have been concerned with at some point when making an impression was important to you, such as on a date or at a job interview. If you have had a problem, the fear of having bad breath is always with you. Unfortunately, we can’t always easily assess the quality of our own breath. But there are ways for you to get a more accurate answer.
Chances are good that at some point you’ve tried to check your own breath by cupping your hand and directing an exhale from your mouth into your nose. The problem with this method is that your sense of smell is designed to ignore background odors, which it will often consider your breath to be, making this method completely ineffective.
You are probably wondering, if this very common method of cupping your hand to test your breath is that ineffective, is there a reliable way? Well, almost all methods have one inherent problem, they are subjective. That is to say that bad breath is in the nose of the beholder. Even so, the best and most reliable method to determining if you have bad breath is still asking someone you trust.
However, many people are very uncomfortable with asking someone about their breath, and many people would be uncomfortable in telling someone that their breath was bad. You may therefore want to try a different method to determine for yourself how your breath really smells.
One way to do this is by using a lick test. To perform this test, lick the inside of your wrist with the end of your tongue and give it a few seconds to start to evaporate. After waiting this few seconds, smell the inside of your wrist. This may allow you to smell any odors caused by bacteria in the front of the tongue by separating it and making it no longer a background smell.
While the lick test can help assess bad breath caused by the front of the tongue, the more common places for bad breath to originate are on the back of the tongue and in between rear teeth, so we will test those areas as well. To test the back of your tongue, take a spoon and turn it upside-down. Use the edge to scrape as far back on your tongue as you can, but be careful about triggering your gag reflex too strongly.
Testing between your back teeth is similar, except you will use dental floss between your back teeth to scrape out anything between those teeth. Once you have your scraping on the spoon or dental floss, give it a few seconds and then smell it. If either has a strong odor, that is likely to be how your breath smells to other people.
If you think you may have a chronic problem with halitosis, you may want to talk to your dentist about it. Your dentist may have a tool called a Halimeter that can measure gasses in your breath that have been associated with bad breath. Even if he doesn’t have a specialized tool, your dentist has probably encountered many cases of bad breath and he will probably be honest with you about it.
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Source by Chris Steiner