What is the difference between polishing and buffing?

Many people that I’ve had the pleasure of having as clients seem to be having trouble wrapping their heads around the concepts of polishing and buffing. These two are not the same, and depending on what you want the item that’s being restored to look like, you might need only polishing, or polishing and buffing. Let’s dig in and see just what kind of differences are there between the two.

What is the difference between polishing and buffing?

The one major difference between polishing and buffing is that polishing isn’t as through of cleaning of the item surface as buffing is. Most people seem to be expecting that when an item gets polished, if it’s a metal object that we’re talking about, his surface will have that extremely shiny, sharp looking reflective effect. For some easy to polish metals that is the truth, however for a large majority of them, that’s not the end product of polishing.

To get that shiny effect, you need to buff the surface of the item, after polishing it and doing everything you can with polish. Think of buffing as the next step after polishing. Polishing takes care of all the bigger defects on the surface of an item. Once you’ve achieved everything you can with polish you need to move over to buffing in order to get that fine shiny finish. That’s what buffing is for and that’s what the difference between polishing and buffing.