Hi, my name is Brianna Stoebner. I help people learn how to properly floss their teeth the right way and deliver the best results. I’m going to show you four steps to flossing your teeth. Flossing the right way prevents the risk of gingivitis, inflammation of the gum tissues, and periodontitis, the eating away at the bony structure holding your teeth in.

Step 1: Get the Floss Ready

The first thing you will have to do is get the correct amount of floss to be able to floss your teeth. If you select an amount that is too small, you will not be able to wrap the floss around your fingers to get enough control of your floss. The correct amount of floss should be about 18 inches. Next, you will wrap the floss around your middle fingers on both of your hands. There should be about two or three inches off floss between your two middle fingers when you should quit wrapping the floss around them. The middle fingers will give you enough strength when trying to get the floss between your teeth. The fingers that will do the flossing are the pointer fingers and the thumbs. These three fingers should be the only ones that are involved when trying to floss.

Step 2: Put the Floss Between Your Teeth

Then, you will take the floss that’s between your middle fingers and make a see-sawing motion in between your teeth up to your gum line. You want to do the see-sawing motion to prevent you from snapping the floss up and hurting your gums and cutting them. You also don’t want to take the floss up too far; your teeth are curved at a certain angle and you cannot go straight up.

Step 3: Form and "C" and Floss

After that step, you will take the floss that is up by your gum line and form it into a “C” shape that will contour with your teeth. This step is very important because this will allow you to fully get below your gums and remove any of the plaque that you may not be able to get to with your toothbrush. You will do this step on one side of one of the teeth you are in between as well as the side of the other tooth that you are along. You will move the floss up and down to get all the areas of the tooth.

Step 4: Take Floss Out and Repeat

Last, of all, you will have to take the floss back out from in between your teeth. You will just repeat what you did to get the floss between the teeth, making the see-saw motion and go towards the bottom of your teeth. You just need to repeat all of these steps of getting the floss between your teeth and doing the “C” shape and removing it from between all of your teeth. And just like that, you have efficiently flossed your teeth!