Why are some waxes so expensive?

So you might be on the market for car wax and are wondering why are there some that are way more expensive than others? Trust me, we have sen it all, there are some auto detailers that say they only use waxes that cost north of $400.

The claim from these detailers are that they charge $1,000-$10,000 per vehicle depending on the results that the client is trying to receive. The waxes they use are directly from a tree in Brazil in its most purest form.

But lets be real, most auto detailers are not going to be spending thousands of dollars on just a single wax.

For the most part, depending on the quantity, most common folk are going to be using a car wax that costs anywhere from $10- $100 that can be found on autogeek.com and sites alike.

Does paying more for a wax mean that the detailer will achieve better results? Not necessarily.

Most of it is just marketing

As with anything, marketing is king. Why is it that arrowhead water can be bought for a fraction of the price that voss water can? Marketing. Marketing will determine if the jeans you are wearing will cost a couple bucks, or if because it has a certain logo, it will now cost hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars. The same can be said with car detailing products.

Most of the pricing comes from the hype and build up that companies are able to build around their brands which then in turn gives them the ability to mark up the price of their items. They come up with brilliant ways to get you to spend double or even triple of what the competitors are selling their products for.

So in short, is there really a difference between the low cost wax vs the high cost wax? sure, there may be a small difference in ingredients and in quality, but for the most part, not really.

Maybe some will give a higher gloss than others or some might last a little longer but to the untrained eye, most detailing customers are not going to notice the difference to justify the price gap.

The real difference is in the prep work

If you are going to wax your car without properly prepping the paint for the wax, you will not achieve the results as you would if you would prep the cars paint.

Lets say you have a car that has been neglected and never detailed. Full of scratches and oxidation. Throwing a layer of wax on it is not going to do a single thing. The real difference is in the prep work, in the polishing of the paint and the finishing of the paint prior to the wax. As mentioned in the example above, throwing any level of wax call it 10-10,000 dollars will not make a change on damaged paint so in that case, does it really make sense to throw that wax on there?

I would rather have someone properly prep the paint and have a cheap dollar store wax applied than having a crappy prep job and the highest priced wax on the market.

At the end of it all, most of the time, those high end waxes don't make sense for most auto detailers and weekend warriors. Sure, if you are going to wax a 5 million dollar 1/1 car then maybe using an insane wax would make sense but for most people, it doesn't.