What Are Pearl 3 Stage Paints? (2024)

Every year, more and more cars are made with pearl finishes. These are known as 3 stage finishes. The first coat is a basecoat color, then a translucent pearl is applied and finally a clear coat finish. Pearl colors have been around since at least the sixties. They used to be created by mixing ground up fish scales with the paint. Elvis Presley’s 1960 Cadillac went one step further by adding ground up diamonds to the paint. Now the most widely used pearl additive is titanium dioxide coated transparent mica flakes.

These colors look great in the showroom, but take a great deal of skill and experience to match in the shop. The key is getting the base coat right. You can’t directly see it because it has the translucent pearl coat covers the base coat. The process entails making a number of test panels and comparing the test panel to an undamaged section of the car. A match involves not only the color but also the angle at which the mica flakes lay, known as flop. If the applied finish has a different angle, it will reflect light differently from the original finish and the color will appear to be different.

Topics: Collision