Will a drugstore product give you whiter teeth?(Up front: news: trends: advice)

Pearly whites like these aren't good enough for many people nowadays. As one of our dental consultants remarked, "people want bombshell white." Hence the demand for tooth-whitening.

Dentists do a very effective kind of whitening, using highly concentrated peroxide bleach, often augmented by a special light. The treatments cost hundreds of dollars.

Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and other toothpaste manufacturers saw an opportunity and now offer at-home bleaching kits costing only $15 to $30.

To find out whether the kits come close to what a dentist can do, we tested products from Crest, Colgate, and Rembrandt. We gave samples to 78 staffers and also hired a university dental lab to test them. The Quick Ratings, at right are based on the lab tests.

How do the whiteners work? The ones we tested use a weaker version of the peroxide that dentists use. Applied to visible surfaces of teeth toward the front of the mouth, the chemical lightens tooth color.

Are the whiteners easy to use? Most are. You brush on the Colgate Simply White Night and Crest Night Effects before going to sleep and leave them on overnight. Colgate Simply White and Crest Whitestrips are daytime products applied for a half-hour, twice daily. You paint on the Colgate: you press the Crest Whitestrips in place. All Colgate and Crest whiteners are to be used for two weeks.

You squeeze Rembrandt 2-Hour White into one-size-fits-all mouth guards (included) and wear them for four 20-minute stints. The whitening paste tasted tolerable, but the ...