Cloudy, yellowed headlights restored to clear in about 90 minutes — at your driveway, your parking stall, or your office. From $120, anywhere in Calgary.
Book Headlight Restoration →Headlight restoration removes the failed clear coat and oxidised top layer from a cloudy polycarbonate lens, then seals the surface with a fresh UV coating — returning the light output your headlights had when the vehicle was new.
Glam Detailing performs headlight restoration in Calgary as a fully mobile service. We come to your driveway, your parking stall, or your office, from Aspen Woods to Auburn Bay. Most sets take about 90 minutes and start at $120.
Every restoration is finished by machine, not by hand. That distinction matters more than any other decision on this page, and the sections below explain exactly why.
Headlight restoration in Calgary costs between $100 and $220 for a pair, depending on how far the oxidation has progressed and whether a long-term UV coating is applied. Glam Detailing charges $120 for a single-stage restoration and $220 for a two-stage restoration finished with a ceramic UV coating. Both include mobile service anywhere inside Calgary city limits, with no travel fee.
The difference between the two is not how clear the headlights look on the day. Both finish clear. The difference is how long they stay that way.
Vehicles with severe oxidation — where the lens has gone opaque rather than yellow — may need an extra sanding stage. We tell you before we start, not after. Full service pricing is on our pricing page.
Restoration is worth it in almost every case where the lens is hazed or yellowed but not physically cracked. A replacement headlight assembly for a common Calgary vehicle — a RAV4, an F-150, a Civic — runs $400 to $1,200 per side before installation labour, and on vehicles with adaptive LED projector units it passes $2,000. A two-stage restoration covers the pair for $220.
| Option | Typical cost | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| Two-stage restoration | $220 / pair | Lens is yellowed, hazed, crazed or pitted — the damage is on the outside surface |
| Assembly replacement | $400–$1,200+ / side | Lens is cracked, water is inside the housing, or the reflector has burned |
| Retail restoration kit | $25–$45 | Mild haze, older vehicle you plan to sell, and you own a polisher |
Replacement is the right call in three situations, and only three:
Everything else — yellowing, milky haze, fine crazing, sandblasted pitting from winter gravel — is a surface problem on the outside of the lens, and surface problems are what restoration solves. If you are not sure which category your headlights fall into, send us a photo and we will tell you honestly. We have talked people out of this service before.
No. WD-40, toothpaste, baking soda and bug spray all work the same way — they leave a thin oily or mildly abrasive film that temporarily fills the micro-pitting in an oxidised surface. The lens looks clearer for a few days to a few weeks, then hazes over again, because none of them removes the failed clear coat that is causing the problem.
WD-40 and bug spray are worse than useless. Both contain solvents that attack polycarbonate, softening the lens surface and accelerating the next round of oxidation. The short-term clarity is real; so is the long-term damage.
A retail kit — Sylvania, 3M, Meguiar's, Cerakote — is genuinely different from the household remedies, because it contains actual abrasive stages and a sealant. If your headlights are mildly hazed, you own a random orbital polisher, and you are willing to spend two careful hours, a kit will give you a real result.
Two things go wrong with them in practice. The first is that hand-sanding leaves an uneven surface, and an uneven lens scatters light — the headlights look clear in daylight and throw a worse beam pattern at night than before you started. The second is the sealant: most kits include a wipe-on UV sealant that lasts four to six months in Calgary sun, at which point the lens is bare polycarbonate again and oxidises faster than it did originally, because the factory clear coat is now gone for good.
The honest version: a kit is a reasonable choice on an older vehicle you plan to sell. A machine-applied two-stage restoration with a ceramic coating is the right choice on a vehicle you are keeping.
Badly oxidised headlights are restored by wet-sanding the failed clear coat off in progressively finer stages, machine-polishing the lens back to optical clarity, then sealing it with a UV-stable ceramic coating. Skipping that final sealing step is the single reason most restorations fail within six months.
Total time is around 90 minutes for a standard pair. Heavily oxidised lenses on older vehicles can take two hours. The vehicle should not go through a car wash for 24 hours afterwards while the coating finishes curing. It is the same coating chemistry we use for ceramic coating on paint, formulated for polycarbonate instead.
A headlight restoration sealed with a ceramic UV coating lasts two to three years in Calgary. A polish-only restoration with no coating lasts four to eight months. The entire difference is UV exposure — Calgary records more days of sunshine than any other major Canadian city, and unprotected polycarbonate begins hazing again almost immediately.
This is why the cheapest quote in the city is usually the most expensive one. A $60 polish-only job looks identical to a $220 two-stage restoration on the day it is done. Eight months later one of them needs doing again, and the lens has less material left to work with each time.
A restoration is not permanent under any circumstances — the coating is a consumable layer and it wears. What a proper coating buys you is years instead of months, and a lens that is still thick enough to restore again when that time comes.
Headlights turn yellow because the factory UV clear coat on the polycarbonate lens breaks down, leaving the plastic underneath exposed to oxidation. Calgary accelerates that failure on three fronts at once: the highest annual sunshine of any major Canadian city, chinook freeze-thaw cycles that stress the coating repeatedly through winter, and road treatment — calcium chloride brine and traction gravel — that abrades the lens surface on every commute.
The gravel matters more than most people expect. A winter of Deerfoot and Stoney Trail driving puts thousands of fine impacts into the leading face of each headlight. Individually they are invisible. Collectively they break the clear coat's surface into a pitted texture that holds moisture and salt, which is why Calgary headlights tend to fail from the outside face inward while the lens edges still look fine.
Chinooks compound it. A lens that swings from −20 °C to +12 °C and back inside 48 hours expands and contracts against a coating that moves at a different rate. That cycle, repeated through a Calgary winter, is what lifts the clear coat at the edges.
Practically, it means Calgary vehicles show headlight oxidation earlier than the same model in Vancouver or Halifax — typically from year five or six rather than year eight. The same conditions are why we recommend paint correction on a similar cycle.
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Glam Detailing restores headlights at your address anywhere in Calgary — there is no shop to drive to and no travel fee inside city limits. We work from a fully self-contained mobile setup, so a driveway, a condo parking stall or an office lot all work equally well.
Based in Alpine Park in the southwest, we cover the full city — NW, NE, SW, SE and downtown. Airdrie, Chestermere and Okotoks are available with a small travel charge.
Most customers book a headlight restoration alongside an interior detail or a full mobile detail, which is the cheapest way to buy it. The work happens while the rest of the vehicle is being done, and the $90 bundled rate applies.
No. Restoration works on the outer surface of the lens. A crack passes through the material and will keep letting moisture into the housing, so a cracked headlight needs the assembly replaced.
No. Glass does not oxidise. If your vehicle predates roughly 1990 it likely has sealed glass headlamps, which may be dirty or pitted but will never yellow. Every modern headlight lens is polycarbonate.
They can. The Alberta out-of-province inspection assesses whether headlamps are secure, undamaged and producing adequate output, and lenses hazed badly enough to cut light output are a recorded reason for a fail. Restoration before the inspection is far cheaper than a replacement assembly after one.
About 90 minutes for a standard pair, up to two hours on heavily oxidised lenses. You do not need to be present once we have access to the vehicle. Avoid a car wash for 24 hours afterwards while the ceramic coating cures.
Yes. We bring a fully self-contained mobile setup to your home or office anywhere in Calgary — no drop-off needed, and no travel fee inside city limits.
