Product Review: Turtle Wax T-240KT Headlight Lens Restorer Kit

“This unique process restores dull, yellowed headlights to like new condition in less than 5 minutes per lens. The Lens Clarifying Compound quickly removes surface discoloration and may be all that is needed to restore clarity.” Or not.

Cost: About $8

Going into another brutal New England winter it’s important to be able to see where you’re going, especially since if you own a car you’re likely to be driving it in the snow at some point in the next 3 months. Headlight plastic dulls, clouds, and frankly turns yellow as it ages. I drive a 14 year old car with 177K+ miles, a perfect example. Most of the headlight restoring kits I’ve seen (Mothers for example) require the use of a power drill to do the buffing, and that scares me. Drills near the paint, no. So I picked this one up as an alternative. The directions are fairly simple, and anything that states “well ventilated area” is at least more than water… probably.

Here’s the before photos of my car’s headlights. The driver’s side one is far worse, I’m guessing from spending the majority of its driving time in the left lane.

Turtle Wax recommends using masking tape to protect the paint, which I gladly did after scrubbing the headlights clean.

Step one involved the gritty cream and a cotton cloth. You wax-on that stuff, and then wax-off with a terry cloth. This was enough to get my passenger side light crystal clean, but that wasn’t bad to begin with.

The instructions then say if step one doesn’t get your headlights properly clear to use these three pads in numeric order with a bottle of water-like lubricant it came with. After scrubbing through all this I have to admit I don’t see a lot of difference.

Last is a sealing towelette, which oddly they give you gloves for.

I suppose if you get what you pay for, than that’s what $8 of headlight cleaning and 20 minutes looks like. They do give you enough off the bottled stuff to do this a dozen or so times, but really it doesn’t look like it’s going to help. In the end the headlights don’t really look much better, but at least they don’t look any worse. I recommend saving your $8 for a better kit or a professional job.