Your paint should feel slick to the touch and actually look wet even though it's perfectly dry.
Dark colored cars show the "wet-look" better than lighter colored cars but regardless
of the color of your car, you should be able to tell a well detailed car from a car that has
been run through a car wash.
Examined through a microscope (as a cross-section) the perfect example of a car's paint should look like this (it's inrealistic in real life unless you keep your car in a vacuum)..
ClearCoat
Paint
Undercoat
Body Panel
IF your car has never been professionally detailed, the corss-section probably looks like this...
Once the paint has been prepared properly (to remove the contaminants that sit ontop of the paint) and buffed/polished, it will look like this
(we're not trying to thin down the clear-coat too much)
BUT essentially rounding off the edges of the valleys has a componded effect,
it removes the sharp angles that reflect light and show themselves as swirls/scratches in the pain
AND probbaly removes the smaller valleys totally ... which ends up giving us a finish that looks like ...
There are things we cannot and will not attempt to correct, failing clear-coat, deep scratches.. and orange-peel
