I'm a car detailer - most TikTok hacks are fake, a 'magic' cream will never get rid of your deep scratches

A CAR detailing boss has explained why you shouldn’t rely on TikTok for hacks designed to remove vehicle scratches before revealing the proper course of action.

Greg Kasparian, founder and CEO of Ride and Shine, a mobile auto detailing business based in Saddle River, New Jersey, said he’d noticed a commonality between these viral social media clips.

Kasparian told The U.S. Sun: “Everyone knows on the internet there’s a lot of fake stuff out there.

“So, you’ll see some TikTok videos where it’s like: ‘Look how we removed this scratch immediately,’ and I can just immediately tell from what they’re doing that it’s a totally fake video because the scratch is so deep and so bad that you can’t just like rub a cream on it and then the scratch goes away.”

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Greg added that the only way to remove an exterior scratch is to take the vehicle’s clear coat down.

He described a car’s clear coat as a transparent layer of paint applied to the top of a vehicle’s base coat, acting as the final layer in the auto paint system.

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Greg said: “If your car is black, it has the black paint, and then there’s a clear coat on top of it. So most scratches are within the clear coat.

“Now, if you basically like sand down that clear coat, it will remove those scratches permanently.

“And when I say sand-down, the options are you can actually wet sand the clear coat, or you can use compound, which is an abrasive polish, or you can use a finer polish if the scratch isn’t too deep.”

The car detailing CEO also said: “If the scratch has gone through the clear coat and into the base paint, the only thing you can do is either use some touch-up, which is not great.

“I mean, it does work to kind of just hide it; it doesn’t look as bad.

“Or, you would just have to take it to a body shop and have the whole panel repainted, which, it’s pretty expensive.”