Chris Gallahar is the CTO of Adam's Polishes and has been working with the company for 7 years. He graduated from Colorado School of Mines with a bachelor's in chemistry with an emphasis on bio-chemistry and minor in economics and business. He's a detail enthusiast and nerdy about car care. As CTO, he leads Adam's technical team and runs Monday morning Show & Tell meetings. He works with the CEO to review new products, testing new formulations, and operates a tester network across the country. Chris is passionate about his work and takes pride in being able to offer high quality car care products to enthusiasts around the world. Adam's Polishes is a leading force in the car care industry.

Silica and ceramic coatings are commonly thought to be the same thing because they both start with the building blocks of silicon and oxygen. Because both silica products and ceramic coatings get called ceramic, there's lots of confusion in the market place. There is a big difference between the two. A ceramic coating is a resin that covalently bonds to painted car surfaces and air temperature cures glassy and hard. The resins used in ceramic coatings are glass-like but not actually glass. Silicates and specialty silicon formulations from Dow and others give a ceramic effect. Solvent based products are typically siloxanes and water based products are typically either silicas or silicates. In general, when someone refers to a true ceramic coating, they're referring to a product that's part of the latter category: solvent based with lots of SiO2 in it.

At its most basic, graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of the element carbon. Graphene oxide (GO), on the other hand, is made of the same carbon atoms but with some oxygen atoms added in. Because of this addition, GO is much more water soluble than regular graphene. Even though GO is black in color (the black you see in some products), it's actually heavily reduced graphene oxide, which is essentially just graphene. However, because those oxygen atoms make GO more water soluble, it can be used in a much wider range of applications. In contrast, regular graphene is difficult to work with and thus has fewer applications. ultimately, whether a product says "graphene" or "graphene oxide" comes down to marketing and intended use.