- Red paint is the most expensive paint color.
(Car revving)
(upbeat music)
Why is that?
In fact, what makes any paint more or less expensive
than the rest?
Well, this can of paint right here cost $200 a gallon
and this can cost $2,000 a gallon.
How can that be?
These colors to the naked eye are pretty much the same.
So what's in this can that makes it 10 times more
than this can?
Well, to answer that, we're gonna pick apart
the chemistry of paint, look at a secret ingredient
that makes certain paints so costly
and figure out what color is really the most expensive.
Answer, it's pretty surprising.
(upbeat music)
Thanks to our friends at Modfind
for sponsoring today's episode of Bumper 2 Bumper.
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Now let's get back to some B2B, bay baby.
So to answer our question,
we need to know the basic chemical makeup
in the average can of paint.
And the main components inside paint
we're gonna talk about today are the binders,
the solvents, the fillers, and the pigments.
So what do each of those do exactly?
Well, a binder is exactly what it sounds like.
It's a resin that gives the paint adhesive properties
allowing it to bind to the car surface.
And it basically is what makes the paint dry
into a thin film after being sprayed onto the car.
Then you have your solvent,
which is used to keep the paint in liquid form
until it's sprayed onto the car.
Now water-based paints,
they still have a bit of solvent in them,
albeit much smaller amount than solvent-based paints.
Now fillers are white or slightly colored powders
of cheap natural minerals, like talc, gypsum, or chalk.
And most cheap paints have a lot of filler in them.
Finally, we have the pigments,
and they're typically a granular or powdery substance
that gives the paint it's color.
Pigments can be natural or artificial oxides,
metal salts, metal powders,
as well as organic pigments for brighter colors.
Now, if the paint needed to be of higher quality,
each of these basic ingredients
would be made from a higher quality material.
For example, binders in a higher quality paint
usually are resins that are urethane-based
rather than acrylic-based,
because they're more durable and chip resistant.
Now in the auto world, there are two main types of paints,
solvent-based paints and water-based paints.
And regardless of which one we're talking about,
they share many of the same ingredients.
Now our $200 paint here
has a higher percentage of filler in it.
The filming agent is cheaper,
so it'll probably degrade faster
and the pigment will fade quicker.
It also has a solvent-based paint,
which is cheaper to produce.
Now up until the early 2000s, nearly all car manufacturers
were using solvent-based paints.
Today, it's the complete opposite.
Nearly all new paint jobs are using water-based paints.
So why are the paint companies
switching into water-based paints,
even though it's more expensive to produce?
Water-based paints contain less VOCs.
Those are called volatile organic compounds.
Paints with higher VOCs
were known to have these strong smells
that kind of pretty much got you high.
And so when you work with them, they are pretty dangerous.
And aside from the solvent content dropping,
water-based paints are actually more durable.
Now another advantage of water-based paints
includes they're easier for color matching,
which is especially important
during refinishing and blending application.
And also they have more vivid
and cleaner hues than solvent-based paints.
And all of these upgrades in the paint meant that
water-based paints cost on average 55 cents more per ounce.
Now a gallon of paint, that's a 128 ounces.
So switching from solvent to water-based paint
needs an increase in cost of about $70,
but we have an increase in cost of about tenfold.
So what's going on with these two
that make them so different?
Well we're gonna get to that.
Now water-based paints, so they're nice and all,
but they do create some trouble.
This never ending quest by car companies
has advanced so far in recent years,
resulting in so many different shades and finishes.
There are just too many colors being made now.
So paint shops have needed to get very scientific
when figuring out what the exact shade a car is.
So to remedy this,
paint shops have started to using spectrometers.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Jerry's Spectrometer Shop.
We got spectrometers of all kinds.
We got IRS spectrometers.
Do you know how much one of these things cost?
Probably not, but we're slashing prices.
Come on down. We'll give you a good deal.
(upbeat music)
So in body shops that are doing lots of paint repair
in order to color match the paint as best as possible,
they use a type of spectrometer called a spectrophotometer.
So they take a spectrophotometer,
they slap it up against the car, and it takes a reading.
Some of that light will be absorbed by the paint
and the rest will bounce off.
Well, the part that bounces off,
it strikes the detector inside that spectrophotometer
and it senses what light is being transmitted
and then converts that into a color code
and therefore a paint code.
So that's pretty cool,
if you're interested in matching a very specific paint
but it doesn't tell you all that much on a chemical level.
So, I took some samples
of our expensive and our cheap paint here.
And I had them sent off to be analyzed
by energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy,
meaning it can tell us what inorganic elements
on the periodic table are inside the paint.
So the X-axis represents energy
and the Y-axis represents the number of counts.
So when we compare our two paints,
we can see the expensive paint
has sodium, magnesium, sulfur, barium, and copper.
This method not only tells us
what elements are in the sample,
but how much of each element.
You can see right here in the cheap paint,
we have 2.11% aluminum.
While the expensive paint, we have 3.14% aluminum,
the higher the peak, the bigger the count,
the more that element is inside your sample.
So we just talked about a bunch of paint chemistry.
That's all great and all, but I wanna know
what makes this stuff expensive?
Where the paint really gets costly
is in the pigments that's used.
Now pigments are finally ground solid particles
that are mixed into liquid solutions
that give most plastic inks and paints their color.
Now white is usually made from titanium dioxide,
and black is sourced from carbon.
Now red is usually the most expensive basic color,
because it's made of an organic compound
and comes from red ochre, a natural clay earth pigment,
that gets its red tint from a mineral, called hematite,
which is Fe2O3, for my chemistry boys,
and that is dehydrated iron oxide.
The need to mine this clay
is what makes red an inherently expensive color,
which adds a pricey stop in the manufacturing process.
So when car brands need to make a special paint color,
the production process can be very complex.
And as a result be quite expensive to produce.
For example, Lexus has a color called Structural Blue,
and that actually has no blue pigment in it at all.
(upbeat music)
It was inspired by the American morpho butterfly
because its wings look like they're blue,
except it doesn't have any blue on its wings.
Instead, the color blue as seen by the human eye
is created by a light interference
on the microscopic lattice surface structure
of the butterfly's wings.
Lexus wanted to emulate that effect.
So they took colorless particles
of aluminum and zinc sulfide
and back-end coded them in multiple layers onto a film.
The multi-layer process that Lexus uses on the particles
is what reflects the visible light
to create a jewel-like blue color.
This then goes through a 12-step production process
that involves stripping the multi-layer structure
from the film, drying it, grounding it into flakes,
and then heat treating it.
And after all of this, Lexus now has the desired pigment
for their Structural Blue paint.
Now the final product allows a car to cast detailed shadows
of the body in broad daylight
but also appear as if it was glowing blue at night.
Now I know I just quickly explained
that whole entire process
but it took Lexus 15 years to refine that process
to achieve its final paint product.
(upbeat music)
Now let's take a look
at this $2,000 a gallon paint right here.
This is from a paint company called Glasurit
and the paint code is 3R7,
also known as Silver Liquid Metal paint.
And it's used on the Porsche 918 Spyder.
(car revving)
And this paint costs a lot of money for two main reasons.
The first is that it's from the Glasurit 90 line.
This is the highest tier paint
offered by the company,
meaning all the ingredients are top shelf.
If we're talking soda analogies, it's like Dr. Pepper
and the cheaper paints they're like Professor Pepper.
Professor Pepper, we have 24 flavors.
Now the second reason
is because of their special pearl toner
used to make this silver pigment super reflective.
Now the pearl toner is made of finely ground flakes
made from natural iricadescent Mica,
which are coated in metal oxides.
And what is really crazy is that this paint is just one part
of a multi-step process that ends up costing you $64,000.
So in the simplest terms, this paint is worth $2,000,
because it uses higher quality materials
than this regular old $200 one.
Is $2,000 worth it
for a gallon of pretty much basically silver paint?
I have half a pint here.
We didn't buy a full gallon
because we didn't have $2,000 to spend on it,
but we spent about 150 bucks on half a pint.
I have this extra paint
and we don't know what to do with it.
We sent it off for some analysis.
We have some more,
what do you think we should paint with it?
Thank you guys for watching.
Follow us on Instagram @donut, @donutmedia,
follow me at @jeremiahburton.
Till next week.
Bye for now.