How To Refinish Your Headlights With American Icon Finishes’ Graphene Ceramic Coating

Nearly every car made since the mid-1980s has plastic headlight lenses, which changed front end design, as designers could get away from the large blocky front grill style to the sleek designs that we have today. While this looks great, over time, the plastic lenses haze up and get cloudy through oxidation, which seriously degrades their function. Headlights have one job, and if the lenses are covered with cataracts, you won’t be able to see much passed your own bumper. Luckily, cleaning up cloudy lenses is fairly simple, and only takes about 15 minutes per lens.

Where most DIYers go wrong when polishing headlights is that they spend all their time removing the haze, only to leave the now vulnerable plastic exposed to the elements so that the oxidation process can immediately begin again. The maximum life expectancy of a headlight polishing is about 3 years before it needs done again, but it also can be as short as 6 months, especially of you didn’t get the deepest scratches out or use low quality plastic polish.

In order to get the very best life out of your polished headlights (and to protect new lenses for new vehicles!), applying a hard protective coating to the lens is highly recommended. You have to be careful, as some protective coatings for paint are not suitable for clear plastics. POR Products, the company that makes POR-15, knows a thing or two about oxidation, so much so that they have added a line of graphene ceramic coatings to their American Icon brand of paint products. Unlike the POR-15 restoration products which are all about prepping the metal itself, American Icon focuses on the final steps of a restoration job- the paint and clear coat. Their clears offer superior gloss retention and buff-ability that custom painters love. Protecting that luscious paint is just as important as all the work that went into the prep-stage. This is where American Icon 1140 Pro Graphene Ceramic Coating comes in.

Unlike other ceramic coatings, American Icon’s Graphene coating applies with ease in just a few minutes and gives you up to 9 years of protection. It simply wipes on and gets hand buffed off after two minutes. You can reapply a second layer to ensure you have full coverage, but that is it. You can even use a UV light to check the coverage, which is a standout feature of this Ceramic Coating.

Prep the headlight lens by washing the vehicle and then taping off paint.