Receding gums treatment: what stops it, and what rebuilds it

Receding gums don’t grow back on their own. That’s the answer most pages on receding gums treatment take a long time to reach, and it matters, because it changes the job. At home, the goal is to stop recession getting worse. Putting gum back over an exposed root is work for a dentist or periodontist, and it’s done surgically.^[1]

Both halves of that are achievable. Gum health can be maintained in most people with good home care, and where a receded area isn’t causing problems, monitoring it is often the right call.^[2] Where it is causing problems, root-coverage surgery has dozens of randomised trials behind it.^[3] What doesn’t exist is a rinse, oil or supplement that regrows gum tissue.

Below: what recession looks like, what causes it (ranked by how strong the evidence is), what stops it, how the home remedies grade out, and what a dentist can actually rebuild.

One disclosure before we start: Evexia’s owner also owns Greco Gum, a mastic gum brand, which comes up in one section near the end.

What do receding gums look like?

Gum recession means the edge of the gum has pulled back past the point where the enamel-covered crown ends, exposing part of the root it normally covers.^[3] That exposed root is the most obvious sign.^[1] In practice, a tooth looks longer than its neighbours.

What you feel often comes first: sensitivity to cold, heat or sweet things, sensitivity when brushing or flossing, and discomfort near the gum line.^[1] Exposed roots are also frequently associated with decay and with non-decay wear lesions near the gum line, which is part of why recession is worth managing rather than ignoring.^[2]

It’s also very common. A 2025 meta-analysis pooling 22 observational studies estimated that about 81% of people have at least 1 mm of recession somewhere, 48% have at least 3 mm, and 16% have at least 5 mm.^[4] Cleveland Clinic puts it at about 88% of people over 65.^[1] It becomes more common with age, and it turns up in populations with high standards of oral hygiene as well as low ones.^[2]

That last point is worth sitting with. Recession isn’t a verdict on how well you look after your teeth. Plenty of careful brushers have it.

If you want to know whether yours is moving, ask your dentist for the number. Recession is measured in millimetres with a periodontal probe,^[1] and a baseline turns a vague worry into something you can track.

Can receding gums grow back?

No. Gum tissue that has receded doesn’t regenerate on its own; Cleveland Clinic’s patient guide says so in as many words.^[1]

That’s the most useful fact on this page, because it sorts every product claim you’ll meet. Anything sold as regrowing gums is claiming something the tissue doesn’t do. The honest claim available to a rinse or a supplement is smaller: that it might calm gum inflammation, part of the gum disease picture that drives much recession. That’s worth something. It’s a different claim.

What can put tissue back is surgery, by one of two broad routes: grafting new tissue over the root, or moving the gum you still have to cover it. Both are below. Composite bonding, which covers the exposed root with tooth-coloured resin, can hide the problem and protect the root, but it works on the tooth, not the gum.^[1]

Why are my gums receding?

Usually for more than one reason. The 2025 meta-analysis ranked the risk factors that turn up in observational studies, and the order is informative:^[4]

• Periodontitis (gum disease that destroys the tooth’s attachment): odds ratio about 9.9
• A high frenulum (the fold of tissue joining lip to gum, attached close to the gum edge): 4.6
• Plaque: 4.3
• Occlusal trauma (heavy biting forces on a tooth): 3.2
• Alcohol: 2.0
• A history of periodontal treatment: 1.9
• Smoking: 1.8
• Being male: 1.5

These are associations from cross-sectional data, not proof that each one causes recession. A few deserve a closer look.

Gum disease comes first by a distance. Clinical guides list both periodontal disease and plaque build-up among the causes,^[1] and the numbers put them near the top.^[4] If your gums bleed when you brush, that’s the place to start, well before worrying about brushing technique. For how plaque works as a bacterial community, and why the aim is balance rather than sterilising your mouth, see our guide to the oral microbiome.

Thin gums recede more easily. People with a thin gum phenotype are at greater risk,^[2] and a predisposition to thin gum tissue partly runs in families.^[1] That’s why two people with identical habits can end up in different places.

Brushing too hard is widely blamed, and the evidence is unsettled. A systematic review of 18 studies found eight linking brushing frequency to recession, and flagged brushing force, bristle stiffness, technique and how often people replaced their brushes as possible factors. None of the observational studies met all the quality criteria, and the reviewers concluded that the data could neither support nor refute the link.^[5] So: plausible, widely believed, not proven. The fix costs nothing, which is reason enough to make it.

Tooth position and orthodontics. Teeth that sit out of line are on the clinical list of causes,^[1] and orthodontic treatment itself may raise the risk.^[2]

Tobacco and piercings. Smoking and chewing tobacco both appear among the causes, as do lip and tongue piercings,^[1] which the Cochrane reviewers class as a trauma factor alongside incorrect brushing.^[3]

Clenching and grinding: genuinely contested. Heavy biting forces show up as a risk factor in the observational data.^[4] The idea usually attached to them is abfraction, the theory that biting forces flex a tooth and wear away its neck near the gum line, making room for the gum to recede. The narrative review that informed the current international classification of gum conditions found no credible evidence that abfraction exists as a process, or that it causes recession.^[6] Those two findings can both be true: people who grind may have more recession for other reasons. My read is that the mechanism is unproven rather than disproven. If you clench, there are better-established reasons to deal with it, which we cover in our piece on the masseter muscle.

How to stop receding gums from getting worse

This is the part you control, and none of it is exotic.

• Use a soft brush, gently. Cleveland Clinic’s prevention advice specifies a soft-bristled brush,^[1] and brushing force and bristle stiffness are among the suspected factors in the brushing research.^[5] Let the bristles do the work, not the pressure.
• Clean between your teeth every day, with floss or interdental brushes.^[1] Plaque is one of the strongest risk factors in the data.^[4]
• Treat inflammation instead of living with it. Bleeding, puffy or tender gums are worth a dental visit. If periodontitis is behind your recession, deep cleaning below the gum line (scaling and root planing) is the usual non-surgical treatment.^[1]
• Stop smoking or chewing tobacco. Smoking is one of the modifiable risk factors in the pooled data.^[4]
• Think about piercings. If lip or tongue jewellery sits against a receding area, raise it with your dentist.
• Get a baseline and recheck it. For recession that isn’t causing problems, monitoring the site is often the right approach.^[2]

Can you reverse receding gums at home?

Not in the sense of regrowing tissue. What home remedies have been tested for is plaque and gingivitis, which is the inflammation side of the problem. None of the trials below measured recession. Graded on what they actually found:

Aloe vera mouthwash: the best of the bunch. A systematic review of six randomised trials with 1,358 participants found aloe vera reduced plaque and gum inflammation in every one. Against chlorhexidine, the standard antiseptic mouthwash, it was roughly comparable for gum inflammation and weaker for plaque, with no or minimal side effects, where chlorhexidine stained teeth and altered taste. The reviewers called the evidence preliminary and inconclusive.^[8] Of the popular remedies, it’s the most reasonable one to try for irritated gums.

Oil pulling: unproven, not debunked. Swishing cooking oil around the mouth. A systematic review from Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine found five randomised trials, 160 participants in total, lasting 10 to 45 days. Oil pulling didn’t differ significantly from the comparison groups on plaque or gingivitis scores, and those comparisons included chlorhexidine.^[7] You can read that two ways: as a hint that oil pulling performs like an effective rinse, or as trials too small to tell anything apart. The reviewers leaned cautiously positive and asked for better trials.

Mastic gum: one small pilot. Covered in its own section below.

Anything sold as regrowing gums: no evidence it can, because the tissue doesn’t do that on its own.^[1]

The pattern across all of them: calming inflammation is a plausible, modest benefit. It supports the list in the previous section. It doesn’t replace it.

How do dentists fix receding gums?

It depends on why it happened and how far it’s gone. Surgery may be recommended when the risk of further recession or root damage is high, or when the appearance bothers you.^[2]

Connective tissue graft. Tissue from beneath the surface of the palate is placed over the exposed root, usually under a flap of your own gum that’s moved up to cover it. A Cochrane review of 48 randomised trials found this gave a slight edge where both root coverage and a wider band of firm gum are the goal, and the reviewers describe connective tissue grafts as the gold-standard procedure.^[3] Worth knowing: they rated much of the underlying evidence low quality, and only one of the 48 trials was at low risk of bias. Recovery typically takes about two weeks.^[1]

Donor tissue instead of your palate. Acellular dermal matrix, processed donor tissue, avoids a second wound in your mouth. There’s weak evidence that it’s the substitute that comes closest to a connective tissue graft.^[3]

Free gingival graft. The older grafting technique, used to reduce recession and widen the band of firm, attached gum around a tooth.^[3] Thickening thin gum is a legitimate goal in its own right, since thin gum is what recedes most readily.^[2]

Pinhole surgical technique. Instead of cutting a flap and taking tissue from the palate, the dentist works through a single 2–3 mm entry incision to reposition the gum over the root, using a resorbable membrane or donor matrix, with no second surgical site. The founding paper was a retrospective case series of 43 consecutive patients and 121 recession sites, written by the dentist who first described the technique. On milder defects (Miller Class I and II), 81% of sites achieved complete root coverage, procedures averaged 22 minutes, and complications were minimal.^[9] That’s promising. It’s also the weakest design in this section: no comparison group, the technique’s originator reporting on it, and about 18 months of follow-up. Worth asking about if you want to avoid a palate wound. Not the reference standard.

Composite bonding. Tooth-coloured resin over the exposed root. It can hide the recession and cover a sensitive root, but the gum doesn’t change.^[1]

Orthodontics. If a tooth’s position is part of the problem, braces may be an option.^[1]

Receding gums treatments compared

Treatment	What it does	Covers the root?	Evidence
Deep cleaning (scaling and root planing)	Removes plaque and tartar below the gum line to treat gum disease	No	The usual non-surgical treatment when periodontitis is driving recession
Connective tissue graft	Palate tissue placed over the root, usually under a repositioned flap	Yes	Described as the gold standard in a Cochrane review of 48 randomised trials; much of the evidence low quality
Donor tissue (acellular dermal matrix)	Processed donor tissue in place of your own palate	Yes	Weak evidence it comes closest to a connective tissue graft
Free gingival graft	Older graft that reduces recession and widens the band of firm gum	Partly	Older technique; improves recession depth and the width of firm gum
Pinhole surgical technique	Gum repositioned through a small entry incision; no palate donor site	Yes	Retrospective case series by its originator: 81% complete coverage on milder defects
Composite bonding	Tooth-coloured resin over the exposed root	No, covers the tooth	Cosmetic and protective; the gum is unchanged
Desensitising toothpaste or varnish	Reduces root sensitivity	No	Symptom control, not a fix for the recession

What about the sensitivity?

Often it’s the part that sends people searching. Exposed root surface is frequently linked with dentine hypersensitivity, the sharp twinge from cold, sweet food or brushing.^[2] Dentists manage it with desensitising toothpaste, fluoride varnish or other desensitising agents.^[1] Hydroxyapatite toothpaste is another option people use for sensitivity; we go through what its trials show in our hydroxyapatite toothpaste guide. Sensitivity that’s new or getting worse is a reason to get checked rather than just switching toothpaste.

Mastic gum and gum inflammation

This is where our owner’s product comes in, and the claim is small, so I’ll keep it the right size.

Mastic, the resin of the Chios mastic tree, has one directly relevant human study. In a 2003 pilot from a Japanese dental school, 20 healthy dental students took part in two double-blind randomised experiments comparing mastic gum with a placebo gum. In the first, bacterial counts in saliva were significantly lower over four hours of chewing mastic. In the second, volunteers stopped all brushing for seven days while chewing one gum or the other: the mastic group built up less plaque (plaque index 2.69 against 3.15) and had less gum inflammation (gingival index 0.44 against 0.66).^[10]

That’s a real result, and a small one. Twenty dental students with healthy gums, one week, and a design that deliberately removed brushing so plaque would build up. It says nothing about people who already have recession, and nothing about gum tissue. Mastic does not regrow gums. No gum does, and neither does anything else you can buy.

Where it could fit is the inflammation side covered above: a sugar-free chew with a small signal against plaque and gum inflammation, used alongside brushing and cleaning between your teeth, never instead of them. We cover the wider mastic evidence, including where it’s thin, in mastic gum benefits.

If you want to try it, Greco is single-ingredient: 100% Chios mastic resin, with no sweeteners and no synthetic gum base. It’s at grecogum.com. Greco Gum shares our owner (Hubert Ventures LLC).