Hi, I'm Kirby Allison
and we love to help the well-dressed take
care of their wardrobes.
In today's installment of our four part
series on how to create
and maintain a mirror shine,
I'm going to be focusing on one of the most important
elements: What to do once
you've created that mirror shine
and want to maintain it for as long as possible.
If you have any questions
or comments during this video please
feel free to ask them in the comments section below
and I really look forward to getting back to
them personally.
A highly polished toe
or a mirror shine is one of the few things
that will further set you apart
from even those already considered
well dressed.
And that's because few have the know-how
or the time to produce a proper mirror
shine
or the knowledge of how to maintain one.
In this video,
I'm going to show you how to maintain that mirror
shine once it's already been created.
Now one of the important things to know is that
although a mirror shine can take time
and energy to create,
and certainly the Saphir Mirror Gloss makes
that easier,
once it's created,
it's actually quite easy to maintain
because the majority of the hard work
has already been done.
Luckily a mirror shine is very easy to
determine whenever it needs a little bit of maintenance.
It just simply no longer shines
like it used to.
You'll either see some dull buffing
or, more commonly,
small cracks that begin to disrupt
the smooth surface that is the hallmark
of a beautiful mirror shine.
There's three products that I'm going to use in the
maintenance on a mirror shine.
First, I'm going to use the Saphir
Pommadier Cream Polish.
Now the purpose of using the Cream Polish
is to buff down
or to remove a few of the top
layers of wax on the mirror
shine. What this is doing is it's
just pulling a few of the top layers
off that might be disrupting that mirror
shine so that you can then
redevelop that using the Pate
de Luxe.
Then I'm going to use the Saphir Medaille d'Or
Pate de Luxe.
Now the purpose of the Pate de Luxe again
is just producing that final
buffing to really elevate that high
shine provided that you still
have a sufficient foundation of
hard waxes on
the area that you're trying to produce the high shine
a little bit of Pate de Luxe will really quickly
re-glacage
and produce a nice mirror shine.
Now if you're having trouble producing that
mirror shine after you've used these two products
or if you see that too much of that hard
wax foundation has been removed,
then you can always use
the Saphir Mirror Gloss to redevelop
that foundation.
Now of course,
throughout this entire process you're going to need
a little bit of water
and I'm using our Hanger Project High
Shine Chamois because that's what's going
to allow me to really buff this surface
to produce that high shine.
So I'm gonna take my high shine chamois,
a little bit of this if
Pommadier Cream Polish,
and I'm just going to massage
it onto the surface here.
Now at this point you really want to think of this
almost more as cleaning,
because what you're doing is you're cleaning
any type of dirt off of those
first few layers of wax.
You're gonna massage
this in using a light to
medium pressure.
Because again you're trying to clean
this area of the shoe.
Maybe take a little bit more.
Small circular motions.
Now set this aside
and allow that to dry
and then repeat
the same process on the other shoe.
Now once this has had an opportunity to
dry, find a clean portion
of your chamois.
So using a little bit of water
and a little bit of Pate de Luxe.
Now what I'm going to do is to buff
that polish off the
same way you do during the normal show
and process.
Set that aside
and allow it to dry.
Now at this point the process of really
redeveloping
or maintaining your mirror shine is much
this much the same as creating
it.
You're trying to build
small layers of wax
that you then buff to a shine
and do that progressively until you reach
the desired shine.
So I'm just using a really small
amount of wax polish,
a little bit of water,
and then buffing
this using
light to medium pressure.
With luck,
you'll be able to recover
and renew your mirror
shine for a few additional
weeks of nice use.
So this is a process that really can't
be rushed.
What you're trying to do,
again, is to just build up
that wax finish
and what you're looking for is what you
might see like right here.
It's hard to see but you can
see where the wax,
the hard waxes have completely come off.
I can see the pore
structure of the open grained leather
or the full grain leather
and so that's an example of
an area that you're not going to be able to fix
through the maintenance of a mirror shine.
And so if you see that
the finish or the wax finish is
too splotchy
then you know, that's the point at which
you really have to just remove
all of the waxes
and start over.
But if you've created a nice mirror shine,
just a little bit of maintenance can renew it
to an above average shine
if not back to its original glory
with just a little bit of work
and so,
you know, you can get two,
three,
maybe even four weeks of
occasional wear out of a
nice mirror shine.
Now you may say occasional
use over three
or four weeks, given the
amount of work that goes into the mirror shine,
it doesn't seem like much.
You know,
you're not incorrect
in thinking that.
There's no question that a mirror shine
requires work.
And certainly it is very
fragile,
relatively speaking,
finish,
but it's just like a really finely pressed
white shirt. I mean,
you know, at a certain point a finely
pressed white shirt is no longer a finely
pressed white shirt.
Same thing with the mirror shine.
The best mirror shine will
last several
weeks
with maintenance, but at some point
you're just going to have to start over.
Now depending on how much time you have,
it might inform how much of a touch up
you have time to do.
I mean sometimes,
if I'm just headed to church
or if I'm traveling
and about to walk
out the door,
I might take a little bit of polish
and just do one quick
buff.
Again,
something is better than nothing,
and with a little bit of wax polish
and a high
shine chamois, you could really do a really
nice quick shine
fairly quickly.
As with anything,
especially with the mirror shine
you really have to be careful about getting lost
in the "mirage",
as I call it.
I mean it's easy
to be sucked into this process
and to really get lost
and find yourself
really spending an hour
or more just,
chasing
the shine if you will.
So I like oftentimes
kind of set an arbitrary time limit
to say "look, I'm going to see how much,
or how far I can get this in five
or 10 minutes
and then I'm going to put my chamois down
and walk away from it".
Often times
as you take a little bit of a break,
you come back and you realize
that the shine is actually a lot nicer
than you thought.
Now one of the things I'm doing right here by
rubbing the chamois on my cloth
is just trying to remove
any of the residual
kind of hard wax deposits on this chamois
just because as I buff,
you know, I really want kind of a clean
surface, so I find that this
helps, this final buffing,
you're actually doing it quite briskly
and you want to really bring heat.
You know,
the heat is going to be what helps
kind of melt
and seal those waxes
to produce that high shine.
OK.
So here we are.
And you can see,
the shine is really
re-elevated quite nicely.
I mean, I can see myself
speaking in my reflection
on this toe cap. That certainly wasn't
the case before we renewed
this mirror shine.
Now, it still has some imperfections,
I mean you can see right
here especially on the inside edge,
I do have some hairline cracking
and those have been concealed
with the work that we did,
but it's still disrupting
the mirror shine a little bit.
You know there's a few imperfections,
especially on the toe,
I mean that's always the first thing to go in a mirror
shine.
You can see here on the toe
where some of the pore structure
has been revealed again because those hard
waxes came off.
Anytime you could see those pores,
you're not going to get a mirror shine because
it's not reflecting that light perfectly.
So in order to do that,
to conceal this,
you know I would either need to use the Mirror Gloss
or pull everything off
and start over.
But, for five to ten minutes,
I'm definitely going to get some additional use
out of the hard work I put into developing
this mirror shine.
One of the comments we see quite often on
the YouTube channel, especially on our first
mirror shine video,
is just a little bit of discouragement
that after a few wears,
they see that their mirror shine has begun to
crack or has dulled a little bit.
It's important to understand that
with proper maintenance,
like what we just showed here in this video,
and a little as five to 10 minutes,
you can really bring that mirror shine
up to 80 to 90 percent of where
it was originally.
The additional time
and effort that you put into the maintenance of a
proper mirror shine is just
that subtle calling card of a proper
gentleman.
Discover more about how to create a mirror shine
by watching our entire series
on a proper mirror shine here on our YouTube
channel.
If you have any questions
or comments about anything we discussed in this video,
please feel free to ask
and in the comments section below.
I look forward to getting back to all those questions
and comments personally. If
you liked this video give us a thumbs up
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And of course please visit
hangerproject.com where we have the largest
most comprehensive collection of luxury
garment care
and shoe care accessories in the world
as well as other products for the well-dressed.
We have a section on our website devoted
specifically to the mirror shine.
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I'm Kirby Allison,
and we love helping the well-dressed take care
of their wardrobes.
Thanks for joining me.