For the most part, when people wash their cars, one of the last things they’ll do to add the cherry on top is to dress their tires.
Of course, the most reasonable product to use is a tire dressing. That way your tires can have a nice black shine instead of a dull-brownish or grayish look to it.
In this short article, I’m going to cover the basic factors of a tire dressing, what kind of tire dressing are out in the market, and how long it should last on your tires.
How Long Do Tire Dressings Last?
I feel like a broken record here as I’m going to say what I’ve been saying in all the other blog posts that I’ve written on this site. It’s going to be highly dependent on the type of product you’re using, how and where you drive your car, and the condition you drive it in.
If you want a quick and simple answer, maybe 2 days, maybe 5 days, maybe a whole week…. Heck, they now have tire coatings on the market that claim to keep your tired nice and black for 6-months to a year.
Yes, 6-months to a year. You read that correctly.
The Contributing Factors To The Longevity Of The Tire Dressing
As mentioned above, there are a lot of factors that will dictate how long the tire dressing will stick to your tire.
For starters, how dirty are your tires and what kind of gunk is on them? If it’s your typical dirt, mud, and break dust, that’s not a big deal. That can be easily cleaned back to an almost like-new condition.
However, if you have dried brake fluid or some other type of strong liquid, you may not be able to get it out of the tire. Which means when it comes time to apply the dressing on the tire, the tire dressing won’t be able to make full contact with the rubber (aka tire).
So how well you clean the tire is one of the contributing factors to the duration of the tire dressing.
Next would be the type of dressing that you’re using. Now and days, the automotive detailing industry is pretty big. Which means there are tons and tons of products on the market that claim to do the same thing. In this example, dress your tires to a black shine (or matte, or mid-shine, depending on your preference).
In my personal experience, it doesn’t make much of a difference of what type of tire dressing you buy if you’re only going to do this for the fun of it. You know, simply to make your car look nice. The only time it really matters is if you know for certain that you want a dressing that can last X amount of time, or if you run a business and a customer is requesting a durable tire dressing.
Finally, do you keep drive your car everyday or do you keep it in a garage for 90% of the time? If you have a show car that you keep in your garage and it sees minimal sun and dirt, then the chances of the tire dressing fading away is less than if you were to drive it every single day in the sun.
Conclusion
What I always recommend to people wanting to detail their cars, is just buy what’s in your budget and try it out. There’s products that cost $7 and you can find others that cost around $20. But your human eye is only going to see so much of a difference.
If you see that one product is high-gloss and the other is low-gloss, you probably won’t see much of a difference between the two. So in that case, just buy what best fits your budget.