Exaggerated marketing and plain old misinformation have created a confusing bunch of car care assumptions. I’m here to bust some of the most common myths, and give you the information you need to make informed decisions about caring for your prized possessions.
First stop on the truth train: Carnauba wax content!
Many car care manufacturers advertise their waxes as being “100% Carnauba Wax”. Yeah, right… I’d sure hope not! If what they were selling you was all-carnauba, it would be hard as a rock and come in brick or flake form. The pure carnauba would be too hard to apply to your paint (and would probably scratch it). The absolute maximum amount of carnauba content that can be effectively used in an automotive wax is 50% (and even there, it would be quite difficult to apply).
Check the actual wax content before you buy. More is better, but only to a point!
June 16th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
What about that new wax being sold by P21 that is said to be 100% carnauba wax? Is there something missing with their claim of 100% as they say in their add that they solved the problem.
June 17th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Great question Ben! I should probably clarify the article a little bit. There are two different ways wax content can be presented; total wax content and carnauba wax content.
Total wax content would be the percentage of wax in the bottle, tub, or stick you buy, so when you hear manufacturers claim 20%, 30%, etc they are talking about total wax content. An example would be, if you purchased an 8oz tub of wax with a 25% wax content then 2oz of your 8oz would be wax. The rest is made up of other things used to soften the carnauba, ease application, etc.
Carnauba wax content would be the percentage of wax that is carnauba (so the 2oz in the example above). Any automotive wax claiming to be 100% carnauba wax would be talking about their carnauba wax content and not their total wax content. As explained in the article, pure carnauba is rock hard and not safe for automotive paint. Anything done to soften this and make it useful for automotive applications would have to add something to the carnauba wax thus making it less than 100% carnauba.