I was talking to a like-minded car care enthusiast mate the other day and remarked that five years ago he wouldn’t have looked twice at Turtle Wax but nowadays they are among his ‘go-to’ products. He’s not alone, I think.

Firstly, people started to recognise that some of the products in their core range (they have a separate Turtle Wax ICE sub-range in the USA, but not in the UK) were beginning to get some rave reviews. Having tried some of them – and written about them here _ I’d agree wholeheartedly with that.

Then a couple of years ago, the company launched their Hybrid Solutions line-up, which really does take things up a notch or three. I’ve used all five of that range and when I heard that they had recently unveiled a couple more I jumped straight on to the interweb.

A rare dry and almost mild day in January saw me give them a go and frankly, I’m glad I did. I used them on the black sections of Smart ForFour. Not sure why but I’ve used all sorts of products on those parts of the car and none of them have really brought the paint up as a glossy as I’d like.

I went through the snowfoam, shampoo and iron fallout removal stages and then whacked a bit of Ceramic Acrylic Black Polish (these two are ideally aimed at black bodywork) and would definitely advise you to wear nitrile gloves or similar when applying as the products are almost like a black dye.

Glad to see they’ve gone back to their almost Brut 33-like scent! The black pigments and fillers in the wax allow it to fill light imperfections, while the lustrous and deep gloss is something else.

Then onto the Ceramic Acrylic Black Wax detailer which can be used as a standalone gloss boost agent if required and it further enhanced the job that the wax had already done. It was all quite amazing really.

According to the label it contains acrylic and Si02 polymers in its make-up and gives a shell-like finish to your car’s bodywork that is said to be resistant to dirt and water-repellant. It certainly left a deep, mirror gloss look to my paint.

Definitely be aware that black wax means black wax

Impressive both. A 414ml bottle of Hybrid Solutions Ceramic Acrylic Black Polish costs £22 with the Spray Wax version (473ml) coming in at £20.

For more information visit www.turtlewax.co.uk/pages/hybrid-solutions ENDS.