Braces or aligners: the fault decides
Both deliver force at the same biological rate. What differs is the size of each increment and what each one can physically do to a tooth.
The question arrives in the first minute of almost every consultation, and the honest answer is that it is usually not a preference. It is a diagnosis.
The same rate either way
Teeth move at roughly a millimetre a month, and nothing on the market changes that. It is bone remodelling, and remodelling has its own speed. Anyone selling you a six-week smile is selling you either a very small movement or a veneer.
What an appliance changes is the size of each increment. A fixed appliance is adjusted about every six weeks: six substantial increments in a year. An aligner delivers a new tray every ten days: many more increments, each much smaller. The total is the same because the biology is the same. The experience is different, and so is what each one is capable of.
What aligners do well
Spacing closes very predictably with trays. So does mild to moderate crowding, and so does most relapse after previous treatment — which is now a large share of adult cases. Midline correction works with elastics. They come out for meals and for photographs, and they are far easier to clean around.
The catch is the twenty-two hours. An aligner in a case on a desk is doing precisely nothing, and the cases that run long here are almost all aligner cases where the trays were worn sixteen hours a day for four months.
What aligners do badly
A rotation needs a couple — two opposing forces turning the tooth about its own axis — and a smooth plastic shell is poor at delivering one. So is bodily movement, where the crown and the root need to travel the same distance in the same direction; trays tend to tip the crown and leave the root behind. Extraction cases involve a lot of bodily movement, which is why they are still overwhelmingly treated with fixed appliances.
What we actually recommend
Roughly a third of cases here run both, in sequence: a short period of fixed appliances to correct the rotations and level the arch, then aligners to finish and close. It is not a compromise. It is using each appliance for the movements it is good at.
If you have a strong preference, say so at the consultation. If your preference and the diagnosis point the same way you will get what you asked for. If they do not, you will get told why, in millimetres, and you can still decide.