Headlight Restoration & Kits

Headlight restoration brings yellowed, hazy plastic lenses back to clear, and it's one of the biggest visual improvements you can make to an older car for the money. The range here covers the whole job: sanding discs and paper for heavy oxidation, headlight polish and cutting compounds to clear the haze, and UV coatings to stop it coming back. From <a href="/collections/koch-chemie">Koch Chemie</a>, <a href="/collections/carpro">CARPRO</a>, Scholl Concepts and Invision, for hand or machine.

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This is the most important call in headlight restoration, because it decides whether you need to sand.

Mild damage is light yellowing or a slight haze that you can still see through clearly. The plastic surface is still smooth to the touch. This doesn't need sanding, a headlight polish or a cutting compound on a pad will clear it.

Heavy damage is yellowing across the whole lens to the point you can't see the bulb clearly, often with a chalky or rough feel. That top layer of plastic has broken down and no polish will cut through it. You'll need to sand it back first, then polish.

The quick test is a wet finger. If the lens looks clear while it's wet and hazy when it dries, that's surface oxidation and it'll polish out. If it stays hazy even wet, it's gone deeper and needs sanding.
It's the same as correcting paint, just on plastic. Mask the surrounding panels first, since compound on paint is a job you don't want.

Sand if the damage is heavy. Start with a P1500 disc wet, then step up through P2000 to P3000, keeping the surface wet and the pressure light. CARPRO's foam sanding discs are made for this. The lens goes uniformly frosted, which is right, that's the oxidised layer coming off.

Cut to remove the sanding marks. A heavy cutting compound like Koch Chemie H9.02 or CARPRO UltraCut on a cutting pad takes the frosting to clear. A dedicated headlight polish does the same job and is a bit more forgiving on the plastic.

Polish to bring up the clarity. A one-step like Scholl S20 Black or Koch Chemie HLP2 on a finishing pad.

Coat so it doesn't come back. See the coating question below, it's the step most people skip and the reason most restorations fail within a year.

An all-in-one kit like the Invision Headlight Restoration Kit packages the sanding, polish and coating steps together if you'd rather not source each piece.
Nearly every modern headlight is polycarbonate plastic rather than glass, and polycarbonate breaks down under UV. From the factory it has a thin hardcoat that blocks UV, but that coating wears through over five to ten years from sun exposure, road grit, bug splatter and car wash chemicals.

Once the hardcoat is gone, the raw polycarbonate underneath oxidises. That's the yellowing, and the haze is the surface going rough at a microscopic level and scattering light instead of passing it through.

It's worse in Australia than most places because of the UV, and worse on the driver's side on most cars, which gets more sun when parked. A car that lives outside will show it years before a garaged one.

Restoration removes the oxidised layer, but it also removes what's left of the factory hardcoat, which is why a fresh UV coating afterwards matters so much.

Yes, and it's the step that decides whether the job lasts a year or a season.

Polishing takes the factory UV hardcoat off along with the oxidation. What's left is bare polycarbonate with nothing protecting it, and it'll start yellowing again within months in Australian sun. The coating replaces that layer.

A dedicated UV blocking ceramic coating is the right product. CARPRO DLight is built specifically for headlights and plastics, with UV blockers in the formula rather than just a hydrophobic layer. DLUX does the same job and covers trim and wheels too, so it's the pick if you're doing the whole car.

Wipe the lens down with a prep spray first to strip the polishing oils, apply thin, and let it cure before it gets wet. A wax or sealant will work in a pinch, but they don't block UV the same way and you'll be redoing it every couple of months.
Yes, for mild to moderate damage. Heavy oxidation that needs sanding is a machine job, since getting an even finish by hand across the whole lens is hard and the sanding marks are slow to remove without a polisher.

For hand work, a hand polishing applicator with a cutting compound does the clearing. The Lake Country CCS applicators here come in four grades, orange for cutting, white for polishing, black for finishing, so you can work through the stages the same way you would with machine pads. Small circular motions, firm pressure, and keep the compound wet.

Expect it to take longer and to need more passes than a machine would. Twenty minutes a lens is realistic on a moderate one.

If you've got a polisher, a small pad on a mini or a spot pad on a full-size DA is far faster and gives a more consistent result, which matters when you're coating afterwards.

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Headlight Restoration & Kits

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