Lorde has dreams of clean teeth and they’re probably from the best states for dental hygienists.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about the dentist. A large majority of people hate it and would rather do anything else, and some others actually enjoy it. I used to enjoy it when I was a kid until I had to get a cavity filled and they shoved a needle in my mouth. After that, I have a weird relationship with it. Before the needle incident, they used to give you “laughing gas” to put you under so they could perform any dental work, but I guess they stopped doing it. My main qualm, though, isn’t with the needle, it’s with the chatting that happens during any kind of dental work. I can’t form a sentence with a sharp, metal stick in my mouth and I don’t really want to try. I used to just take a parent with me so they could talk to the dentist and I could avoid the uncomfortable interaction.
lenetstan/Shutterstock.com
There’s a difference between some types of dentists, but today we’re focusing primarily on dental hygienists. They’re the ones performing your routine dental cleaning and not fitting you for braces or any of that jazz. They clean the teeth, make sure you don’t have gingivitis, and clean off all the plaque so you can start new and fresh with clean teeth. They’re also the ones who tell you all about the importance of flossing so you can do it for one day and then stop when you realize it’s making your gums bleed and you’re too lazy to do it every morning. Dental assistants will give you the same speech, and you can check out where it’s best for them to live on our list of the best states for dental assistants.
In order to create this list of best states for dental hygienists, we took a look at two pieces of data: the average yearly salary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the cost of living from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. The reason we used both of those pieces of information is because it’s important to take the cost of living into consideration to see how far your salary will actually stretch in different places. This is why we took the average of those two criteria to rank the states. The ones at the top are those that have the lowest cost of living and the highest salary, as that’s the ideal scenario.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the best states for dental hygienists.
