My dad owns a Detail shop and we have found the best way to get rid of that horrible haze that headlights tend to build.


You will need to buy:
-Mirka P1500 sand paper
-Allbrite One Step Polish Wax
-100% cotton buffer pads
-100% cotton towels
-Microfiber cloth


1.) Wet the sandpaper and rub in circles on both headlights. 3 minutes a piece should do. (Don't rub to hard.)
2.) Wipe the headlights with the cotton towel.
3.) Put a little of the Allbrite on the headlights and rub it around with the buffer until it covers the whole light.
4.) Try and use the center of the buffer and buff until all the polish is gone.
5.) Wipe with the microfiber cloth.


This can also remove some large scratches. You can find everything at your local Walmart, Autozone, or any other Auto parts store.

If you live in North Houston, TX then I can do it for you. Most places charge you $70 for both headlights. I charge $20 per light.

 

how do people get hazing on their headlights in the first place?

ive never encounted on my cars...

 

Before

After

 

If worried about scratching the lens (or the near-by paint) with sandpaper. I suggest first just trying to remove the hazing with metal polish. I have had great results with just metal polish. Using sandpaper then polish will probably get the job done faster but I prefer the harder but safer method of just metal polish.

 

Headlights can be polished out without sanding as well. Here I'm showing a side by side before and after-- I just used Meguiar's PlastiX and a small 3" orbital polisher. Sanding is a good solution but you need to be careful especially on coated headlights. I have yet to see a MINI headlight looking this bad. This was about 15 minutes of polishing. Most of the time when headlights look this bad the rest of the car is also neglected.



Here's the same light without the tape

 

Yeah, the crappy plastic headlights on my Town & Country were so badly pitted that only significant wetsanding would do the trick. Followed by a good polish, of course. So it just depends on what you're up against. I did a writeup on this a while back.

kenchan - I think it's just the crappy plastic some lights are made from. Most of my cars have had no issues - but the van sucked after about 4-5 years. Garaged and fairly well cared for...

 

My new neighbor has a white Volvo wagon with broken lights, scratched and oxidized paint, and the whole car is just a mess....oh and the headlights are all fogged, lol. I thought about clearing the lights for them, but the rest of the car isn't fixable through polishing.

 

i see... hummm... i suppose the xpel headlight protectors would be a
good investment not just for rocks, huh?

 

I'm glad I have it applied to my headlights.

 

My Miata's headlights were hazy and pitted. I used Novus plastic polish and a Porter Cable. It's still a bit pitted but it's much clearer now.

 

Lysol wood cleaner is great for removing wax from head lights(or plastic in general), if you were ever waxing your car..

 

My taillights had some slight hazing on them, and I used Megs PlastX on them, did it by hand and it worked great Also took some light scratches on the A pillars with it.
It was no where near as bad as some of the pics posted above though.

Mark

 

I just recently had Glass heads and tails imported in from Europe, I hope I don't get a ticket for them. They are illegal in TX, but I don't have to worry about haze in the future. I do have to worry about rock chips though. eek

The sand paper is such a fun grit that you don't have to worry about damage to your lights nor your car. We've worked with a lot of products and this seems to be the fastest and most effective, from what we have noticed. There is always a better way. We just haven't tried everything, but we have gone through, roughly 27 different products and methods. We like this one the best, so far.

 

Hmmm, you know 27 different products and methods to remove the fog from a headlight? Mind sharing some of them? I know of only one method--and that's polishing.

As for the fine grit being safe that's not exactly true. I can take some 3000 grit sand paper and still sand through the clear coat on my paint--though it will take longer than using 1500 grit. Some headlights have a UV protective "skin" that if you sand it off, will get fogged up again even quicker than before you attempted to fix it.

 

Sharing is good. Kind of the purpose of this forum

Mark

 

Nice info. My wife's G35C headlights are starting to get a haze on them. I used the PlasticX and it looked awesome for about a month, and now it's starting to come back...

 

my G's headlights are clear still looks new (3yrs old 18k miles)...
hummmm... maybe it's the person washing the cars making all the swirlage.

or Best of Show is doing an INCREDIBLE job hiding the haze.

 

HA! Try 88,000 miles of weathering, and we'll see what your headlights look like then Actually, we bought her car with 82,000 miles and the car came looking that way. It was worth it though for the price we paid. I wish I had a small buffer to hit the lights with, but all I've got is a 10" buffer...

 

hahaha!!! i see.

just checkin'

 

my employee's 10 year old Ford Contour was well kept....clean, shiny.....the headlights though were like those in the picture in post #3 of this thread: all hazed, foggy looking, and slightly yellowed. I do not know wjhat type of car wax/polish he was using or if it had a UV protectorant but I doubt be was applying it to his headlights.........I am assuming the haze is not from swirling scratches at all but the polycarbonate plastic being cheap or just failing and reacting to UV rays......he polished them and they were like brand new, but now look just a little hazy.

I'm an optometrist and I've seen a few polycarbonate eyeglass lenses over the years become hazy, sometimes the cheaper ones provided to us by various insurance plans, but even the so called premium brands occaionally will fail and become very hazy ....UV is the culprit, I think

 

so maybe the plastic itself releases some kind of gas and starts to
change property, causing the haze, huh?

kinda like plastic oxidation. i think that's possible. cheap plastics
yellowing even inside the house, etc.

 

The headlights on my '97 BMW look like poo. Formerly clear plastic hazy pitted poo, but still poo. I'm hoping the stuff they make the MINI headlights out of is a bit better.

 

I recently repaired the headlights on my friend's Civic with a kit that utilized various grits of sandpaper and polish. The results were just OK but it was a vast improvement from before. I'm planning to try out some of the plastic polish I used on the plastic rear window from a Mazda Miata I used to own this weekend.

I recommended that he apply the headlight film to prevent future hazing. I understand the hazyness is due to UV rays. Would the headlight film help block out the UV rays? Or the film just protect the lens from abbrasion.

 

if it's just for UV, wax would work just fine.

some headlights crack with those headlight films. on the MCS it's fine.
i have xpels on mine. they look brand new.

here's a closeup. looks like it's wearing contacts, huh?

 

Wait, isn't that because you only have like 3,000 miles on this 4 year old MINI ??