Teeth Shade Chart: Tooth Colour Chart Explained

What shade are your teeth?

Your teeth sit somewhere on a dental shade chart, and on the VITA classical guide, which is the one the sources at the foot of this page work from, they are described by a letter and a number, such as A2 or B1. The letter is the family of colour and the number is how deep that colour is. To find yours, hold a shade guide against the middle of an upper front tooth in daylight, not in a bathroom mirror under a bulb, and pick the swatch that disappears against the tooth. That reading is your starting shade, and it matters more than it sounds, because a shade gain is counted from where you begin rather than towards a fixed finish line.

The shade guide in every Pure Glow box uses 20 numbered shades, from 1 (lightest) to 20 (darkest). Dentists usually work from the 16-tab VITA guide, which is explained below; the idea is the same.

This guide explains what the chart is, what the codes mean, how to read your own shade without an app, and why a naturally yellow tooth is a different thing from a stained one.

What a tooth shade chart (or teeth shade guide) actually is

The chart the research below is built around is the VITA classical A1 to D4 shade guide. It is a fan of sixteen ceramic tabs, each one a reference colour, and it was designed so a technician could match a crown or a filling to the teeth either side of it. That origin is worth knowing, because it explains why the thing feels awkward in a consumer's hands. It was never built to answer "how white am I". It was built to answer "which shade of ceramic do I order".

What the letters mean

There are four groups, and the manufacturer describes them by hue: A1 to A4 are reddish-brownish, B1 to B4 are reddish-yellowish, C1 to C4 are the greyish shades, and D2 to D4 are reddish-grey. Group A also carries an A3.5, a half step, which is how sixteen tabs fit into four groups.

So the letter is not a grade. A is not better than B. They are different undertones, in the same way that two people with the same depth of skin tone can have warm or cool undertones.

What the numbers mean

The number is where the useful information sits. Todorov and colleagues, reviewing the shade guides used in dental practice, put it plainly: each letter group is subdivided one to four, and "with the increase of the number, the Chroma increases, while at the same time, the value decreases". In everyday terms, a higher number means more saturated colour and less lightness. A3 is a deeper, more strongly coloured version of A2.

Why the chart looks confusing when you first pick one up

Because it is grouped by undertone, the guide does not run in order of lightness. A2 and C2 carry the same number and are not the same brightness. That is where the chart stops being intuitive, and there is a fix for it.

The same review records that "the manufacturer proposes an alternative tab order based on the value", which reorders the same sixteen tabs by lightness rather than by hue. As the distributor reference sheet listed at the foot of this page prints it, that order runs: B1, A1, B2, D2, A2, C1, C2, D4, A3, D3, B3, A3.5, B4, C3, A4, C4.

Read left to right, that is lightest to darkest. B1 is the lightest tab on the guide and C4 the darkest. Once you have that order in your head the chart becomes a ruler rather than a colour swatch, and the word "shades" in any whitening claim finally has a unit attached to it.

How to find your own shade at home

You do not need an app and you do not need an appointment. You need a shade guide of some kind, daylight, and about two minutes.

• Use daylight, near a window, with the light behind you. Household bulbs are warm and will push a reading towards the A and B groups. Overhead bathroom lighting is the worst place in the house to judge tooth colour.
• Touch the guide to the tooth. Hold it against the middle third of an upper front tooth, not an inch away from it. Colour judgement collapses across a gap, because you start comparing the swatch with the air behind it.
• Judge in about five seconds. Stare for longer and your eye adapts and begins inventing differences. Look, decide, move on. If two swatches seem equally close, write both down.
• Ignore the tips and the biting edges. The edge of a front tooth is thinner and more translucent than the middle, so it reads darker and greyer. Match the middle.
• Take the reading off the same tooth every time. Upper front teeth are not identical to each other, and the canine is usually the deepest tooth in the mouth. Pick one tooth and stay with it.

Write the reading down with the date. That written note is the measurement, and it is the only thing that will stop you arguing with yourself in a fortnight.

What a phone photo can and cannot tell you

A photograph is genuinely useful, with one honest limit: a phone camera adjusts white balance and exposure on its own, so the same teeth shot at breakfast and at dusk will come out as two different colours. The camera is not lying to you, it is compensating, and it compensates differently every time.

So a photo is not a colour measurement. What it is very good at is a like-for-like comparison, provided you control the conditions. Photograph in the same spot, at roughly the same time of day, with the shade swatch held against the tooth inside the frame. The swatch is a fixed reference, so even if the whole image shifts warmer or cooler, the relationship between tooth and swatch holds. That is the trick: put the ruler in the picture.

Why a naturally yellow tooth is not a stained tooth

This is the distinction that decides whether a whitening result meets your expectations, and it is worth getting straight before you buy anything.

Stain that sits on the outside of the tooth is what the American Dental Association calls extrinsic, "an accumulation of colored compounds on enamel", and it comes from tea, coffee, red wine, tobacco and pigmented food. Colour that comes from inside the tooth is intrinsic, occurring "within the enamel or the underlying dentin". The two look similar in a mirror and they are not the same problem.

Underneath your enamel is dentine, which is naturally a deeper yellow than enamel is. Enamel is semi-translucent, so some of that dentine colour shows through by design. The ADA describes what then happens over a lifetime: "With increasing age, enamel becomes more translucent and thinner, which allows the yellower dentin to show through and the overall tooth color may darken." The Oral Health Foundation makes the same point for a UK reader in a single line, that teeth "can darken naturally with age and can become stained by things like tea, coffee, red wine, and smoking".

Two consequences follow.

First, a healthy, well brushed adult tooth can read as a B2 or an A3 and have nothing whatsoever wrong with it. Brushing harder will not move it, because that colour is not sitting on the surface waiting to be scrubbed off.

Second, a whitening product is not painting your teeth a target colour. Peroxide free whitening acts on the coloured compounds themselves rather than only polishing the outside of the tooth, which is why a shade change is possible at all, but it starts from your dentine, your enamel thickness and your own baseline. B1 is not a destination every mouth can be taken to, because the distance to it is different for everyone, and a claim that skips over that is selling you a number rather than a result. If you want the chemistry rather than the colour theory, we have written up the science behind PAP whitening separately, and put the two chemistries side by side in PAP compared with peroxide.

What "up to 6 shades" actually means from where you start

Now the phrase can be unpacked, because you have the unit.

When a whitening result is assessed by eye, it is recorded as a move along a shade guide. Paravina and colleagues, comparing two guides used for the visual evaluation of whitening, state it directly: the "visual method implies the usage of dental shade guides, and is expressed in shade guide units (SGU)". One shade means one step along that value order above. Six shades means six steps.

Which is why the starting point decides everything. Count it out on the value-ordered list. Someone reading at A3.5 sits eleven tabs away from B1, so six steps is arithmetically available to them. Someone already at B2 has two. The tabs simply run out. That is not a product limitation, it is what a ruler does when you are already near the end of it.

So Pure Glow's PAP teeth whitening strips are described as giving up to 6 shades whiter in 14 days, depending on where you start, and the second half of that sentence is doing real work. Read as a ceiling it is honest. Read as a promise it is nonsense, and somebody who starts at B2 expecting six steps has been set up to be disappointed by the copy rather than by the product.

It is also why the guarantee is written the way it is. The 14-Day Two-Shade Guarantee asks for two shades, not six, because two steps is something a course can deliver from almost anywhere on the guide. If you're not at least two shades whiter, you get a full refund.

Why there is a shade guide in the box

Every box of teeth whitening strips we ship contains 28 strips for the full fourteen days and a shade guide to track your progress, whether you shop Pure Glow strips as a single box or as the 56 strip bundle saver. It uses plain numbers, 1 for the lightest shade and 20 for the darkest, so there are no letter codes to learn: note your number on day one and check it again at the end of the course. It is in there because of how Daniel, who founded Pure Glow, came to build the brand.

He spent fifteen years at Jaguar Land Rover, six of them in health and safety, which is a job where nothing counts unless it is written down. He was working a three shift pattern at the time, drinking a lot of coffee to get through it and smoking, and his teeth were staining steadily. A holiday to Ibiza was what finally pushed him into trying whitening strips. Three sets, none of which stuck, about five pounds straight into the bin.

What he did when he got home is the relevant part. He bought every whitening strip he could get hold of and catalogued every fault in every one of them, one at a time. Ten months of testing followed, and four formulas were rejected before the one now in the box.

That is a measuring habit rather than a marketing one, and a product built that way has no business asking a customer to judge the result by eye and hope. A shade guide costs very little to include and it makes the claim on the front of our PAP whitening strips checkable by the person who paid for it. If a box prints a number of shades on the front and gives you no way to count them, that is worth noticing.

One honest gap, rather than a story invented to fill it: there is no record of Daniel taking his own starting shade reading before that first attempt, because the guide came later than the formula did. What is on record is the cataloguing, and that is where the guide came from.

If you have crowns, veneers or composite bonding

Take a shade reading off a natural tooth, and take a second reading off the dental work, because the two behave differently from here.

The Oral Health Foundation is unambiguous: "Whitening will not work on fillings, crowns or veneers." A ceramic crown holds the shade it was made in. So if your natural teeth lighten by three steps and the crown does not move at all, a restoration that used to blend can start to stand out. That is not a fault in the whitening, it is the arithmetic of one surface moving while the other stays put, and it is far easier to plan for before a course than to discover halfway through one. We have gone through it properly in our guide to whitening with crowns, veneers and bonding.

Take the reading before you start, not after

The point of a shade chart for a consumer is that it turns a feeling into a record. Write down a reading and a date before day one. Photograph the swatch against the tooth, in the same spot, in daylight. Then do it again on day fourteen, and what you have is a comparison rather than an argument.

Two things worth setting expectations on, both answered elsewhere so we will not repeat them here. Shade change is gradual rather than instant, and a strip needs a minimum of 30 minutes on clean, dry teeth to do its work, which is set out in our guide to getting the best results from strips. And a shade you reach is a shade you then have to keep, which we have answered in full under how long teeth whitening lasts.

Find your starting shade first. Everything else about whitening only makes sense once you know where you are measuring from.

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Sources:

• VITA Zahnfabrik, VITA classical A1-D4 shade guide. The manufacturer, for the four hue groups and their descriptions.
• Todorov R, Yordanov B, Peev T, Zlatev S. Shade guides used in the dental practice. Journal of IMAB. 2020;26(2):3168-3173. doi:10.5272/jimab.2020262.3168. A peer-reviewed review paper, for what the numbers denote and for the fact that the manufacturer proposes a value-based order at all.
• Dental Practice Supply, Arranging the VITA Classical Shade Guide by Value. A distributor reference sheet, and the source of the exact sixteen-tab sequence given above. Worth one caveat, because the two sources disagree: the review paper's printed sequence swaps D3 and D4 relative to this sheet. Neither ordering changes the arithmetic used later on this page, since B1, B2 and A3.5 hold the same positions either way, but if you are counting tabs around D3 and D4 specifically, know that published versions of the arrangement differ there.
• Paravina RD, Pereira Sanchez NA, Ghinea R, Powers JM. Colorimetric (CIEDE2000) comparison between two shade guides used for visual evaluation of tooth whitening efficacy. Srp Arh Celok Lek. 2019;147(3-4):142-147. doi:10.2298/SARH181129006P. For shade guide units as the visual measure. Its own argument cuts against reading too much into any single by-eye judgement, including yours: it notes that the visual method stays popular partly because few practices own a colour measuring instrument, and that instruments exist to add objectivity.
• American Dental Association, Oral Health Topics: Whitening. For extrinsic and intrinsic stain, and for enamel thinning with age. A United States source. The stain and ageing mechanisms it describes are not country specific, but nothing on that page is a guide to what may be sold in the UK.
• Oral Health Foundation, Tooth whitening. A UK charity, for natural darkening with age and for whitening not working on fillings, crowns or veneers.