LASER DEPIGMENTATION

Pigmentation means coloring. Our body gets its color from a pigment known as melanin. Different races/tribes may have different levels of pigmentation. For example, Africans have a darker skin color whereas Asians have a fairer skin color. In oral cavity, the color of our gums also affected by pigments. Usually, our gums are pink in color as picture shown below. Some people who find that their gum is too dark, can go for this procedure known as depigmentation to make their gum looks pinkish.

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The traditional ways of doing depigmentation are scalpel surgery, bur abrasion, electro-cautery, cryosurgery, radiosurgery, or using chemical. But these are invasive procedure that will injure the gum to certain extent. The modern way of doing it would be using laser. One of the most commonly used lasers would be diode laser because diode laser targets and destroy pigments. And laser removes the tissue layer by layer, hence its minimal invasive and recovery is very fast. Following are pre-operative and post-operative pictures of laser depigmentation on upper gum done by Dr Su.