Our Top 5 Unsung Heroes - According To Our Chief Chemist And Product Tester
- Jul 9
- 5 min read
Following on from our last post where we covered our Top 5 Best Sellers, We decided we would ask our lead chemist Tom for his 5 most underrated products from our Black Diamond range. We gave him 24 hours to think of 5 products - Here’s what he had to say:
"Without a doubt this product is up there for me. Immediately I thought of Liquid R Wax when I was asked this question. Recently, old fashioned carnauba paste waxes seem to have come back in to fashion. Liquid R Wax is basically these same ingredients but dissolved in a liquid base which makes it quicker and easier to use. It is based around T1 carnauba, which is the best grade available, which is then blended with our secret combination of other waxes which was perfected many years ago using a weatherometer and gloss meters. It's a fairly unusual product which only really gets used by a few of our trade customers and in my opinion doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It gives a brilliant shine and quite a durable finish, and it only takes a few minutes to apply. If I'm honest I wish we sold more of this one. When I first started here at M C I was always taking some of this home and using it on my own car!"
"We've spent a lot of time looking at leather cream products over the last couple of years and although maybe I'm slightly biased, I'm yet to find much at all which even comes close to ours. A lot of other products I've seen leave a horrible, glossy, greasy finish which I don’t like. Once we started picking some products apart, we also found many don't really contain much in the way of leather feed ingredients and are little more than basic dressings. Our product leaves a dry, matt finish which I personally think looks much better, especially in expensive high end vehicles and really does work to keep leather hydrated and prevent damage. To be honest, as this product was already here when I started, I didn't fully appreciate just how good it was until I started taking a more in depth look at what else is available"
"This is another fairly niche product I suppose. But it's hard to make a decent bodyshop safe polish* and I think we've managed it with this one. Silicone is such a critical ingredient in car polishes, it provides gloss, ease of use and a slick finish and without it it's hard to make polish which works well and isn't a nightmare to buff. I'll have to be careful here not to give too much away, but we looked at modifying silicone ingredients to see if we could keep them within the formula but improve compatibility with paint to prevent the dreaded fish-eyes. With some experimentation we arrived on a formula which is totally bodyshop safe and works as good as, if not better than, our standard silicone polish formulas."
*To clarify, "polish" is used as the older usage of the word for liquid wax - We're aware that a growing number of people now use polish when talking about cutting compounds.
"This is one of my favourite products, but another one we don't sell huge volumes of. I think it must seem expensive at first to many of our trade customers but I actually think it gives good value for money. I remember during development we arrived at a formula we were really happy with, but the cost of manufacturing was high. We tested the product up to 500:1 and found it still worked well. We had discussions about reducing the concentration to try and make the product more affordable but decided it would offer better value for money if we sold the product at full strength. Perhaps we would've sold more if we had cheapened it, but it didn't really seem right and to be fair we do have a growing fanbase for this product. I think once customers get past the initial price tag they realise it's an excellent shampoo which competes with the very best. We've also recently tweaked the formula to boost foaming which I think makes a big difference to the end product. Ceramic Shampoo is particularly useful for conditioning polysilazane coated cars (ceramic coatings) but also works well on its own with an almost self drying effect and water beading which looks like the vehicle has just been waxed. It's such an easy way to protect your paintwork, I think everyone should be using it!"
"I'm going to see if I can get away with putting forward two products for number 5 as they are both waxes and compliment each other well within our range. I've always thought the prices of similar products out there is just absolute madness, I will never know how some brands get away with charging the prices they do. Our standard Hardwax product uses good, established chemistry to make a solid product which is really easy to use and gives excellent gloss and durability. Each ingredient has been carefully selected and added at just the right level for maximum performance with no expense spared. I think many end users are put off by the low price but unfortunately as a manufacturer we have to keep margins low to keep the orders coming in from those rebranding the wax. It's actually a more costly formula to produce than most of the more expensive products we know of, and by itself accounts for a decent percentage of the market as it gets rebranded under loads of different names. I guess with us your money is spent on quality chemistry instead of clever branding.
Our ceramic wax is the same again really, but probably even more so. We formulated this product to compete with the best of the European products with astronomical price tags. With help from some friends within the industry we got hold of two or three of the most expensive products on the market (one sells for over £1000!) to test alongside our own formula during development. Our formula is pure T1 carnauba wax within a complex and extremely high gloss reactive base, and I honestly don't think you'll find another wax, at any price, which delivers the same level of gloss. It gets frustrating sometimes when our waxes are overlooked, because we know it's only because of pricing and branding. We have some customers who buy cleaning products from us but get their waxes and polishes elsewhere and won’t even try ours. I honestly think if everyone knew what we know here, they wouldn't use anything else"