Invisalign Closes Open Bite Between Upper and Lower Front Teeth

If there is a gap between your upper and lower front teeth when you bite down, adult Invisalign treatment can close it. Orthodontists call that gap an open bite, and it is a fairly common condition treated in orthodontics.

Most patients don’t actually call it an open bite. They say their front teeth don’t close, or that they can’t bite through a sandwich. But whatever they call it, we call it an open bite, and left alone it tends to get worse over time.

Open Bite Widens Every Year You Leave It Untreated

An open bite means the front teeth do not meet when the back teeth come together. The tongue is naturally drawn to that open space and rests there. It applies constant pressure, which keeps the upper and lower front teeth from closing and pushes them farther apart, so the gap between them grows wider year after year.

An open bite rarely closes on its own. It usually traces back to tongue posture, and sometimes to a thumb sucking habit from childhood, so the pressure that opened the gap keeps acting on it. In an adult the pattern is already set, which is why waiting does not help.

In my experience the speed of that change is what patients do not expect. A wider gap takes more tooth movement to close, so waiting turns a shorter treatment timeline into a longer one. A small open bite of two or three millimeters can close in a little over a year. A larger one runs closer to two years. I tell patients that catching it early keeps treatment simpler.

The before and after here come from an adult we treated. This patient had mild lower crowding, but the open bite was the harder problem. We closed it in about 16 months across roughly 60 clear aligners. The finished bite shows the front teeth meeting evenly where a gap used to sit. A closed bite is not only about appearance, because a balanced bite protects the front teeth from uneven wear and lets the back teeth share the work of chewing.

Invisalign Closes an Open Bite by Moving the Back Teeth

The reality is braces tend to make an open bite worse before they make it better. Braces are small brackets glued to each tooth. A wire runs across all the brackets and pulls the teeth into alignment. As that wire straightens the teeth, its leverage also lifts the back teeth slightly out of their sockets and makes them a little taller.

Taller back teeth act like a doorstop at the back of the mouth. They prop the back of the jaw up, which forces the front of the jaw down and open. That is the exact motion that creates an open bite in the first place. To counteract it, an orthodontist adds elastic bands across the front teeth to pull the upper and lower front teeth together. Front teeth dragged together by elastics sit under strain, so they tend to drift apart after treatment ends.

Clear aligners close an open bite from the other direction, and this is the part that takes the most careful planning. Each back tooth sits in a socket in the jawbone. The aligner caps the chewing surface of every back tooth. Each time you bite down, the back teeth press against that plastic cap, and the cap eases them a little deeper into their sockets. Over the months the back teeth settle slightly shorter. The force is simply your own bite pressing the tooth against the plastic that covers it.

So shortening the back teeth is what lets the jaw close. The lower jaw is hinged at a joint just in front of each ear, so it swings like a door whose hinges sit at the back of the mouth. While the back teeth were tall, they jammed that door near its hinges, so it stayed open at the front. Once the back teeth are shorter, the jaw rotates closed around the hinge and the front of the jaw swings up. Because the hinge is at the back and the front teeth are far from it, a small change at the back moves the front teeth a long way, far enough to bring them together.

The research describes the same combination. A retrospective study of open bites closed with clear aligners found the correction comes from easing the back teeth up, bringing the front teeth into contact, and letting the jaw rotate closed (Harris and colleagues, 2020). Programming those movements takes real planning. An off-the-rack plan, approved without those changes, is where a general dentist offering aligners most often falls short.

The plan we build for each patient looks strange on screen, and we dial in every movement during the weeks of planning that precede the first aligner.

Retainers Keep an Open Bite From Reopening After Treatment

Closing an open bite is only half the work. Older treatment closed the gap mainly by pulling the front teeth down into contact. Front teeth moved that way sit where they do not want to stay, so the bite reopened. Because the aligner also shortens the back teeth and lets the jaw rotate closed, the corrected bite settles into a stable position and stays there.

Teeth drift a little throughout life. That is normal biology, not a sign that treatment failed. A clear retainer worn while you sleep holds the teeth where they finished. Skip it and the teeth begin to move, which is exactly what happens when a retainer goes unworn. Worn as directed, they stay put.

The research backs this up. In a 2023 study of 52 adults whose open bites were closed with clear aligners alone, 94 percent were still closed at least a year later, and the bite shifted by only a fraction of a millimeter (Suh and colleagues, 2023). In more than a decade of closing open bites this way, we have not seen one reopen in a patient who wears the retainer as directed.

If your front teeth do not meet when you bite down, an open bite is worth looking at before it widens. We treat open bites with Invisalign for patients across West Hollywood and Culver City, and we take the same surgery-free approach to a severe underbite. A consultation is the clearest way to learn what your own case would take.