I’ve got a now one-year-old Toyota and with the summer here my adolescents managed to get sunscreen handprints on the doors. Normal cleaning doesn’t work and I tried a suggestion I found online about using an ordinary eraser, but that doesn’t work.
Some comments and random videos online suggest using WD-40 while others say that will melt your car finish. Other say to use rubbing compound. The only suggestion I really liked was shipping adolescents off to the salt mines until they are functioning adults, but that wasn’t a popular idea in the household.
Does anyone have experience with this?
There is a scratch on the bottom of the door panel that I’ll look into working on as well. Any suggestions for that would be great.
(Pointless background story) My father always bought beaters and never even washed the cars, let alone worry about the finish. I only had used cars before I move to Asia, then lived carless in Tokyo for a couple of decades before getting a used car there. My first car in Taiwan was also used and the finish self destructed in the semi-tropic sun here. This is the first car I’ve been around that I care about how it looks.
Many brands of sunscreen will break down the acrylic urethane “Clear Coat” finish. You can get aftermarket finishes to restore the urethane layer but you’ll still probably see the handprints.
Take the car to a reputable auto detailer in your area. They have the tools and the know-how to correct the issue (if it’s correctable without new paint). Probably cost you a couple hundred depending on your area.
Even if you decide to try fixing it yourself, you’ll need to spend a couple hundred on tools and products to get the job done, and it will be an amateur job. And you can only re-try a few times before you remove all the clear coat finish and then you’ve gotta pay someone to paint it.
Beats me. When Ms. Napier’s car was new, the little grandchild planted his suntan lotion prints on the driver’s door, and they’re still there 10 years later.
@Stranger_On_A_Train Thank you for the informative reply. I looked more online and it looks like this is the case. It doesn’t help that my kids participate in watersports so my wife buys sunscreen that will not come off. We went swimming on Sunday and I got some on my swimming suit. It would not come wash off during the entire several hours in the water. Eventually, it did come off in the laundry.
@Napier OK, I suspect that will be the case here. Thanks for your reply.
@crazyjoe I showed your post to my wife and suggested we don’t screw things up more than they are now. We may live with the small prints rather than pay for a professional, but I’m not going to try anything which would make it worse.
So sorry to hear your “new” car no longer seems new thanks to these stains. I remember when a friend of mine was trying to put his bike into the trunk of my new car, and the front fork collided with a taillight, cracking it. I was upset…then he told me that something bad was going to happen to my car at some point and I should just let it go.
I have a used Subaru, which already had numerous dings, scratches and imperfections in the paint, so much that I’m not sure that professional buffing would help.
OTOH it’s a fairly dark shade of blue, which does a pretty good job of hiding these imperfections. Makes me wonder if some car colors do a better job of minimizing the appearance of defects, including sunscreen chemical stains. For instance, in previous years, I had chosen a gold colored car because yellow dust, as was common in the SF Bay Area, was not as visible compared to driving a black car.
I’m not really upset about it. If there were a way to clean it easily, such as the supposed DW-40 trick, then I would have done it, but I’m not obsessing about it.
I appreciate everyone’s experience and information.
For the record, wd40 won’t ruin your paint or melt the clearcoat. If you want to try that, or a diluted solution of isopropyl alcohol (25% or less IPA by volume), just gently wash off the paint afterward and you will be fine.
