The REAL Way to Restore Headlights Permanently

by Scotty Kilmer

Rev up your engines! today I’m going to show you how you can keep your plastic headlights from yellowing and fading and cracking, now you may not know it, but modern cars, all the headlight assemblies are made out of plastic, they’re not made out of glass anymore now the use of plastic instead of glass has a big drawback plastic fades, cracks, while glass, it’s nice and hard, you can always clean it when it gets dirty but really, this is a 24 year old glass headlight and it still shines and looks great, plastic doesn’t last that long, now the modern headlight assemblies hey, they’ve got one better idea, the bulbs just fit inside and you can just pop them in and out when they burn out, but when the assembly gets cloudy and looks horrible because it’s plastic, it costs a fortune to replace these things, and yes there’s kits out there that you can polish them and then put clear coat on them, that generally doesn’t last more than a year or so and maybe not even that, and the plastic is cheap to begin with so as you’re polishing it on you can only polish it so many times then the plastic will just crack and break and then you have to buy the expensive assembly, but I found something that can coat your headlights so they don’t go bad in the first place, it’s much better to prevent something than to keep having to fix it because it keeps fading and cracking, and realize although my videos may be rather short, sometimes they take a while to make, like this one too years, because years ago I decided to try out this Meguair’s headlight coating to see if this stuff actually works, so I bought two headlight assemblies for this Matrix and then I would coat them one a year with this Meguiar’s coating, and at the same time years ago, I got new headlight assemblies for my wife’s Lexus and I didn’t do anything to them, I just left them alone with the original clear coat that the Chinese had spray coated because these are aftermarket assemblies, and check out the difference, here’s the Lexus, you can see the clear coating is bubbling and peeling off, the Chinese had sprayed on, they obviously didn’t do such a hot job putting that coating on, now this was clear coat paint, in the factory they spray paint it with clear coat paint, and a lot of the guys say, oh that’s how we fix them, when they’re cloudy we polish them up then spray them with clear coat paint, but the clear coat paint almost always ends up cracking within a year and then it looks worse than it did in the first place, because clear coating paint it wasn’t made for that, now there are special plastic paints that can paint plastic bumpers and stuff, but they’re not clear like the headlamps that you can see through them, you want them crystal clear, now this stuff, the headlight coating is made
for that, check out these Matrix headlights, they have the Meguiar’s headlight coating sprayed on them once a year, they’re the same age as the other ones were that were clear coated, and these are still crystal clear, that’s a big reason I tell people don’t use clear coat paint on your headlights, it just doesn’t last over time, now if your headlights are already fogged up, you can use the Meguiar’s PlastX and that’s a polish, you can polish all of the hazy and stuff off with this first, you just put it on a clean microfiber towel and wipe it, then you just get the headlight coating and spray it on, if you have a headlight that isn’t faded yet, you would just clean it with a little windex and let it dry and then spray this on to prevent it from getting yellow and faded in the first place, you just spray the stuff on, then you let it dry for 3 to 5 minutes and apply another coat, the second coat will completely seal it to keep the UV rays out and keep the plastic nice and pliable so it won’t crack in the sun and fade, and really, cleaning your headlights once a year and then spraying Meguiar’s headlight coating on once a year is no big deal, it will keep the plastic from fading and it looks great and you don’t have to worry about polishing it and repainting it with actual clear coat paint, and realize like I said before, if it’s plastic, you can only polish it so many times and that’s it, then it’s just going to crack and break and you’ll have to buy another assembly, and yes I miss the old days when headlights were made out of glass and you didn’t have to worry about any of this plastic nonsense, but let’s face it, plastic is here to stay, it’s cheaper to make, they can make it any shape they want so it goes with the style of the car, plastic is here to stay so learn how to deal with it and you’ll be happy, because really, look at the old crapper that I took out of my garbage bin when I replaced it for a customer, it looks pretty good now, but truth be told, you can’t use this one over, the reason I replaced it was because it’s got a crack in the plastic and it filled up with water when it rained, so that’s why you want to prevent it in the first place by putting the coating on so plastic doesn’t crack!