Dr Colorchip Review

If you read any popular car magazines you've likely seen the Dr ColorChip advertisements in the back, probably near the Athena Pheromone 10X For Men ads. While I won't be trying the Pheromone 10x for you, I did go ahead and purchase and use the Dr ColorChip paint chip repair product.

Since I was skeptical that a pricey touch up paint kit was worth the money, I ordered one of their cheaper $50 (or so) packages. They're website is pretty outdated and they offer a zillion products that all appear to be essentially the same. So it took me a while to figure out what I needed. Worse was that they didn't have the paint codes listed for my 2016 model year car yet. So I had to do some investigation to get the paint code and ultimately got what I needed.

You can buy from the Dr ColorChip website (affiliate link) which is probably your best bet, or you can buy from Amazon (affiliate link) if you want to go based on color names.

What You Get

In my case, the kit came with a tiny bottle of touch up paint that was color matched to my car. I could buy this just about anywhere for $10. It also comes with a cheap and tiny paint brush, a lint free paper towel, a rubber glove, and some Sealact Blending Solution. Doesn't seem like much for $50 or so now does it?

The Damage

As you can see above (top left corner), and close up in the image below, these are the before shots that show the chip in the hood of my otherwise flawless vehicle.

A tiny but glaring flaw that was inevitable but none-the-less annoying when it happened. The size if a pin head, most people wouldn't notice it, but to me it was as obvious as a wrecking ball dent in the hood.

The Fix

Using the Dr Color Chip product is actually pretty simple. Shake the paint well, stick the brush in it, dab on the chipped paint area. That's what you could do with the $10 touch up paint too.

The Dr ColorChip system then has you quickly wipe the excess paint out of the chip hole you just painted. Doing that smears it on your car, making a bigger mess than the chip. So that's when the Sealact Blending Solution comes in. Shake it well, apply a tiny bit to the lint-free paper towel, and gently swirl it on the chip (and now paint-smeared) area.

Incredibly, it removes all of the smeared paint in just a second or two. If you did it right the paint you put into the chip hole is still in there. In my case, I had to repeat the process around 4-5 times because it was a very deep chip. The directions say you can repeat as needed right away.

Conclusion

While the Dr ColorChip didn't completely make my paint like-new again, it did work very well. It looks much better than if I dabbed on touch up paint and let it dry which leaves a bump.

Better still, if I stand back a few feet I can't see it at all. Before the repair, I could have spotted it from 50 feet back! Even getting a photo with the area repaired was very difficult as the camera couldn't find anything unusual to focus on and I couldn't see the damage through my viewfinder. So I took a bunch of blind, manually focused shots to finally get the repaired area to show up. The photo doesn't really do the repair justice.

The key is really in the Sealact Blending Solution. I'm not sure what it is, some sort of rubbing alcohol or acetone maybe? It's pinkish and thicker than those items though so clearly it has more in it. But that stuff is what lets you build up layers inside the chipped area without making a mess of the factory paint and without having a too-tall glob of paint on your car. If you have the patience, you could easily do better than I did and what I did is pretty darn good.