I stumbled upon this post on AG from 2018. The guy is a chemist. He makes valid points and I'm not surprised here.
"We have a, genuine, silica/water based product. Cost price probably $10 per litre (that’s our manufactured cost, no brand prifit, no retailer profit- so probably only 10-20% of the cost you guys would pay). It has a tiny amount of silica in it, it only needs a tiny amount! Cost grounds alone make me very skeptical about other products on the market. Those claiming silica contents will immediately raise a flag to me.
In function, I can get 6 months out of a polymer based product with a few resins and waxes to boost. Put into a cream where I have more scope and I can get you a year and that’s without resorting to having to use a dedicated maintenance wash. So I am left asking just why we even care about silica as a thing.
A further bit of anecdote is that I deal with a lot of detailing brand owners. Whilst not always the case, most are not big organizations with their own knowledgeable r&d people. Most are guys who know little more than your average joe about chemicals. Yet somehow they have miracle products and have the next big thing that no one has done before. Hmmm.
What I might suppose is that, at least in some cases, the end user/consumer is not getting what they think. I might even suppose that some brand owners are not even selling what they think! I might suppose also that the end user is increasingly blinded by marketeers who simply have no idea what they are talking about, that the internet user focuses more on buzz words than real performance and that the brands are almost forced to play along because the end user isn’t interested if the product tech is 30 years old.
I suspect that, whilst products have certainly improved over the years, this has been driven by evolutionary improvement of well known chemistries and an increase in brand competition. Silica/ceramic/nano in your economical range- yeah right."
"We have a, genuine, silica/water based product. Cost price probably $10 per litre (that’s our manufactured cost, no brand prifit, no retailer profit- so probably only 10-20% of the cost you guys would pay). It has a tiny amount of silica in it, it only needs a tiny amount! Cost grounds alone make me very skeptical about other products on the market. Those claiming silica contents will immediately raise a flag to me.
In function, I can get 6 months out of a polymer based product with a few resins and waxes to boost. Put into a cream where I have more scope and I can get you a year and that’s without resorting to having to use a dedicated maintenance wash. So I am left asking just why we even care about silica as a thing.
A further bit of anecdote is that I deal with a lot of detailing brand owners. Whilst not always the case, most are not big organizations with their own knowledgeable r&d people. Most are guys who know little more than your average joe about chemicals. Yet somehow they have miracle products and have the next big thing that no one has done before. Hmmm.
What I might suppose is that, at least in some cases, the end user/consumer is not getting what they think. I might even suppose that some brand owners are not even selling what they think! I might suppose also that the end user is increasingly blinded by marketeers who simply have no idea what they are talking about, that the internet user focuses more on buzz words than real performance and that the brands are almost forced to play along because the end user isn’t interested if the product tech is 30 years old.
I suspect that, whilst products have certainly improved over the years, this has been driven by evolutionary improvement of well known chemistries and an increase in brand competition. Silica/ceramic/nano in your economical range- yeah right."
