Just to interject a comment...
While there's no laws or regulations on which words we all use to describe products, the title of this thread refers to a polish but actually what the OP, (Original Poster), is asking about is a 1-Step Cleaner/Wax or a 1-Step Cleaner/Sealant.
Been working on an article about this here,
http://www.autogeekonline.net/forum...ks-cleaner-waxes-finishing-waxes-hybrids.html
2- basic groups of car wax
Let me see if I can remove just a little bit of the confusion… There are two basic groups most car waxes and paint sealants fall into, these would be,
• Cleaner/waxes or Cleaner/Sealants
• Finishing waxes or Finishing Sealants
A cleaner/wax or cleaning/sealant would offer some level of cleaning ability using either chemical cleaning agents, solvents and/or some type of abrasives and often times a combination of all three. Cleaner/Waxes are also referred to as One-Step products or All-In-One products. Cleaner/waxes can be used to restore neglected paint to good to excellent condition depending upon how bad of condition the paint is in and the cleaning ability or strength of the cleaning agents in the cleaner/wax.
A finishing wax or finishing sealant would not contain any ingredients with the intended ability to clean or abrade the paint. Products in this category should only be used on paint in excellent or brand new condition or neglected paints that have been previously cleaned and polished and thus restored to new or excellent condition.
Besides dividing products into two groups by whether they have the ability to clean the paint or not, paint protection products are also divided into two other groups or categories and that's
car waxes or
paint sealants.
Car Wax
Contains some kind of naturally occurring waxy type substance, for example
Carnauba wax.
Paint Sealant
Made from
synthetic or all
man-made ingredients.
So from the above, we can have,
Cleaner/Waxes
A product that cleans, polishes and protects and contains natural protection ingredients like Carnauba
Cleaner/Sealants
A product that cleans, polishes and protects and uses all synthetic protection ingredients
Finishing Waxes
A product that offers no cleaning ability with the focus on maximizing beauty with the protection based upon naturally occurring ingredients.
Finishing Sealants
A product that offers no cleaning ability with the focus on maximizing beauty with the protection based upon synthetic ingredients.
And one more group which would be a
hybrid product which contains a combination of both natural and synthetic ingredients.
If we use the loose definition above for car waxes and paint sealants, (For the wax group the primary protection ingredients are naturally occurring waxy substances and for the sealant group the primary protection ingredients are man-made or synthetic substances), then since hybrid products use a combination of both it would seem normal to call them and place them in their own category with both words, wax/sealant used to describe the category.
The term polish usually refers to a product used to remove defects before applying a wax or paint sealant or a product used to glaze paint to maximize gloss and clarity.
That said, plenty of car wax manufactures use the word polish on the label of product that do in fact
seal the surface.
