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Vintage advertising: DuPont 7 Polish

DuPont 7 Polish “Makes Cars Sparkle!” Scanned advertisement from author’s collection.

Back in the late 1960s, when I was a young teenager, I was helping the old man across the street clean out his garage and found a can of DuPont No. 7 Polish sitting on one of the dusty shelves, alongside a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can filled with old bolts, screws and nails, as well as the occasional marble.

Even though this old can of wax had probably been sitting on that garage shelf since the 1950s, it was still useable, so I promptly polished the blue paint on my Stingray – no, not the car, the bike. Back in the ’60s, covering one’s bike in a coat of wax was a young teenager’s right-of-passage, and we did it regularly. Special attention was given to the chrome plating on the three-foot-long sissy bar that I repurposed as a front fork, which made the well-worn Stingray look like a chopper. It was very cool looking, and could do wheelies with ease!

I had discovered years before that polishing the entire bike at one time would not be a wise move, otherwise the polish – and paste waxes – would turn to a white, cake-on hardness, and would be very difficult to remove. Talk about needing elbow grease – this was the era well before electric polishers became common. The first time I used Blue Coral paste wax was on my father’s black 1965 Oldsmobile, and I coated the car’s entire body in one shot with it. It then took me literally hours and hours to remove all the wax which was now caked-on due to the hot summer sun. As they say, live and learn. And I did.

Back in the day, DuPont’s No. 7 Polish and Cleaner was immensely popular because it worked extremely well. An excellent quality product, no doubt. In fact, so memorable was the No. 7 Polish that today you can read how car owners are still praising its virtues on the AACA’s forums, with many club members calling it “the best polish ever made.”

The copy that DuPont’s advertising agency created to sell the product was quite entertaining. The saying on the bottom of the DuPont 7 Polish can was in script lettering and stated:  “The only polish containing ‘stroke saving’ Methyl Cellulose.” “Stroke saving;” now that’s funny.  The other popular saying was more mainstream: “Fast and Easy.”

At the time DuPont was the primary manufacturer of automobile paints, so in order to best protect the cars and trucks that were finished with their signature line of Duco, Dulux and Synthetic enamels, the DuPont chemists created this special polish. It worked, and worked well, quickly becoming one of the most popular polishes of all time.

Today, it can still be found at select stores nationwide. My local Ace Hardware store sells a 14-ounce bottle of No. 7 Auto Polish & Cleaner for $6.99, but nowhere on the label does it say “DuPont.” Perhaps DuPont sold the rights to the formula years ago.

As the ad says: “You clean off dirt film…put on a super-shine at the same time with DuPont No. 7 Polish. It’s the quick, easy way to keep your car beautiful.”