What’s a better protection option – a ceramic coating or a wax?

Speak to many detailers, or ask the internet at large, and the response is generally:

 ‘Ceramic is always better than wax’.

And here begins the problem…

Better AT what?

Better FOR what?

Ceramic coatings have many outstanding attributes as a paint protection product. They’re low maintenance, scratch resistant and long-lasting. But they also carry some inherent problems.

Likewise, waxes have some negative attributes but also do some things extremely well, such as provide sacrificial protection, enhance older paints, and the ease with which they can be both applied, and removed if necessary.

When choosing a product for our own vehicles, the decision is relatively easy as we know what we want from it! When dealing with customers however, we actually need to work quite hard before the detailing even starts in order to ensure that we are offering the best possible service we can, and maintain a relationship with returning customers.

As mentioned earlier, ceramic coatings have some amazing attributes. Below we have compiled a list of them, and given some explanation as to why they work this way.

Scratch resistance

Not to be confused with scratch-proof, ceramic coatings offer a hard resin layer, which, in certain cases, is harder than the original paint finish. This information is key as the coating will only reach a hardness level in relation to the original hardness of the paintwork. Imagine it as applying a sheet of cling film over a mattress, vs a sheet of cling film over concrete. Softer paints will marr easier than harder paints regardless of the coating, and there’s a multitude of contributing factors that determine this, from paint type to age of vehicle.

The hardness rating usually plastered all over the marketing material can be very misleading. 9H, 9H+, and 10H all sound incredibly hard and exactly what you want from something offering protection. Apart from two vital problems, 9H Mohs and 9H pencil test ratings are entirely different, and the testing carried out to fetch this data is carried out on a metal substrate – not paint – so the ratings are entirely irrelevant.

Ceramic coatings will reduce the number of scratches over a period, but will not prevent them entirely.

Hydrophobicity

Beads and water shedding! What every customer wants, and the only true way to show that a car is protected! Nope…

Believe it or not, the best coatings for ease of cleaning are actually hydrophilic. Hydrophobic is cool because you get beads, water runs off, and you can do cool Instagram-posts when it rains. There is some science behind the beading properties of ceramics, but the hardest and longest-lasting elements of ceramic coatings are often only semi-hydrophobic (or semi-hydrophilic, in a glass-half-full kinda way). Hydrophillic coatings are more expensive to make, and don’t carry the wow factor marketing companies like, so hydrophobicity gets all the press. Also note that any coating describing itself as “superhydrophobic” is lying. Superhydrophobicity is only achieved at 150-degree water contact angles, and these haven’t been replicated in coatings outside of a laboratory. Super-ish-hydrophobic is the best you’ll get at around a 135-degree water contact angle.

Gloss

Ceramics are often touted as giving massively improved levels of gloss, especially when depicted in ‘before and after’ pictures taken at clever camera angles.

Sorry to break it to you, but ceramic coatings can actually reduce gloss. We’ve got the very expensive machines to prove it. If you slap a coating onto a marred paint surface, sure, the reflection will improve. But on corrected and polished paint all it can achieve is a darkening effect. This gives us an improvement in perceived gloss, as darker objects reflect better than lighter objects (think black paint vs white paint and how much reflection each comparatively gives off), but the gloss comes from the preparation.

Easy aftercare

A big tick here. Ceramic coatings are indeed relatively low-maintenance in most circumstances, with only regular washing with and occasional intensive washing with an acidic shampoo required to keep them at their best. Unfortunately, there are also pitfalls in ceramic coating maintenance, such as a tendency to water spot and etch, the lack of options to remove minor light scratching, and full removal and reapplication being necessary if they fail or are installed incorrectly (more on this later).

So what about waxes then?

By the sounds of the marketing campaigns, wax should be pretty irrelevant to modern detailers?

Not quite…

Wax is often seen as the ‘romantic’ way to protect a car these days, a way for home users to spend their sunday lovingly caressing their weekend toy with bubblegum scented pastes, whilst detailers opt for hi-tech coatings needing a degree and thousands of pounds of equipment to install for everything from new car protections to post-detail finishing.

The issue here is that most are oblivious to how much more complicated ceramic coatings can make things in the long run.

Ceramic coatings work by forming a molecular bond with the surface of the paintwork. This takes place when molecules in the coating form covalent bonds with molecules in the clear coat on the vehicle. Basically, they merge together to form a permanent bond by sublimating and assimilating with what’s already there.

This is awesome for lifespan, resistance to chemicals and scratch resistance, but what happens when it does get scratched, or we need to remove it entirely to apply a new coating – perhaps when approaching the end of life?

The only way to fully remove a cured ceramic coating is to use abrasion. There have been some YouTubers claiming that certain maintenance products will ‘strip’ ceramic coatings, but it is pure nonsense.

Once cured, you need to mechanically remove the coating with polishing or (rarely) sanding. The problem with this is that we will need to remove an amount of the original clear-coat every time this is carried out (due to the ‘sublimation’.

Now consider that most detailers recommend a top-up or new application every 2-3 years, it would lead to a 15-year-old car having been machine polished (heavily) 4 or 5 times already in order to keep a coating active on the surface – you can’t just overcoat as the old coating will actively reject and prevent bonding of the new one.

In trying to protect the paintwork with ceramic coatings, we are actually destroying it a little each time we carry out the repeat service on the car.

Wax can be applied regularly and stripped entirely from a vehicle with careful use of non-abrasive products. This makes it much more preferable for vehicles where the original paint is way more valuable than having a protection product which lasts a couple of years. The best example of this would be classic vehicles.

There is another aspect that often gets overlooked, and that is the weekend habits of the customer…

Most customers will return to you for maintenance, which is great. You get to earn more money, and also keep tabs on the protection package you carried out.

However, there are millions of vehicle owners out there who enjoy cleaning their own cars at the weekend. Ceramic coatings are often ideal for this, but not if the customer enjoys washing, fettling, fetteling and waxing their vehicle every 4 weeks.  This can cause massive issues if they wax over a ceramic, and will leave them asking the question – ‘Why did I bother?’.

Water spotting is a known issue with ceramic coatings, and this can really put customers off if and when it happens. It only takes a mild downpour, followed by a sunny spell, and we could be looking at a coating with severe etching. In certain cases, this can only be remedied with a full strip and reapplication. Not ideal after forking out £££’s for ‘protection’.

In the short term, mineral deposits are also an issue through water spotting, but these can be remedied with water spot removers (yet another product the customer will need at home). This is the reason a ceramic coating usually comes with a short-term “topper spray” when installed, to protect it while fresh. The only coatings we have ever found which don’t suffer from this are graphene coatings, and it is literally the only benefit we’ve found in the technology – but we’re not opening that worm can now.

The final worry of home-aftercare is blocked coatings. Blocked coatings give the impression of a failed coating, when in reality, it is a blocking of the hydrophobic properties through mineral build-up. This is remedied with specific acid-wash shampoo products designed for this purpose. Suddenly, the ‘easy aftercare’ of ceramic coatings does not look so rosy.

The last point to ponder is the magic R word that we all love in business… Revenue.

Ceramic coatings tend to be charged out at a much higher rate due to their lifespan, typically anywhere between £700 and £1500 for a paint correction and coating application. This has gently nudged a lot of the industry to ‘one-visit’ customers every few years.

They have an extensive detail, the detailer charges a large amount and waves goodbye to the customer.

Before ceramic coatings became so popular, we would see customers returning every month, quarterly or bi-annually for more protection to be added to the vehicle and a general tidy up. The illusion was that the extra revenue from one single ceramic coating job outweighed the 3 or 4 jobs per year with other products. Sadly it is just that… an illusion.

Consider the labour involved in preparing and applying ceramic coatings. They often take longer to apply and can suffer from more issues during application than most other protection products. This is before we even mention the use of air conditioning and curing lamps to efficiently turn certain ceramic coatings around.

If we look at a standard decontamination, single-stage light preparation polish, and application of a polymer/hybrid wax generating between £350 and £650 two or 3 times a year, then this would be more financially beneficial than just one £800-1500 service every 2-3 years.

There is some scope for customers to be recalled with ceramic coatings for ‘top-up’ details annually, but this almost defeats the object of selling that type of protection to the customer in the first place. The extra cost of the detail was intended to represent the vastly improved lifespan. There have been wild claims from certain manufacturers that their coating will last 7, 8 or even 9 years. The reality is that there is a strict annual service plan to be adhered to, and the particulars of the protection warranty are flimsy to say the least. Lifespan will depend on usage rather than years, so they are worth it for a car doing 20k miles a year on the motorway, which isn’t getting taken care of particularly well, but for a 3k-mile-a-year garage queen who gets washed after a mildly dusty road trip – probably not…

So, the topic of ‘Wax vs Ceramic’ is way more complex than most care to imagine. Especially from a business perspective.

It requires some good forward planning on behalf of the customer, and also assessment of both instant AND ongoing revenue.

Could it be that we have been drawn to the shiny products due to trends and buzzwords, and actually left behind the more profitable (and less laborious) protection products?…

Both have a place in the market, but the biggest mistake is thinking a one-size fits allprotection is the only option to present.

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