ahhhhhh, skiing.

It is finally ski season around here. I ventured out yesterday after applying a new coat of wax.

The wax I selected was the $12 version of red wax. This is the cheap stuff, often referred to as "hydrocarbon wax." The color of the wax indicates the temperature at which it is designed to provide optimal glide. There were other waxes at the store--yellow, blue, and purple, and there were more expensive waxes, too. Some were very expensive. How do they differ?

TOKO explains this on their web site. I do squirm a bit with their casual use of language and structures, but I appreciate their willingness to talk about these things in public! The waxes are color-coded for temperature mostly because the formulations need to vary based on how much liquid water is in the snow. Under warmer and/or wetter conditions, the wax will provide better glide if it is more hydrophobic. Warm temperature waxes are also softer. In cold and/or dry conditions there is less liquid water in the snow, so hydrophobicity becomes less important and the waxes are designed to be harder to stick well to the ski when the snow is cold, dry and abrasive.

Cheap waxes are mostly long-chain hydrocarbons. Wax can be made more hydrophobic by the addition of fluorine, which is expensive and therefore makes for faster but pricier waxes. Fluorinated waxes provide their benefits mostly under warmer or wetter conditions. The expensive cold-temperature waxes use graphite or molybdenum to reduce friction on the snow.

I love the pictures on TOKO's web page and I especially love the diagram that shows the measure of hydrophobicity by examination of the water droplet. But I have a hard time reading that fluorine is a molecule, and their explanation of what makes a good fluorine vs. a bad one looks pretty weird to me. More fluorine molecules in the wax? More high quality fluorine molecules? What? They're not sounding like chemists here, to me. It would be more appropriate to determine percent fluorine by weight, and make comparisons that way.

Maybe this is a bit of deliberate obfuscation to keep the public confused, in the same fashion as car companies advertising "miles per tank" instead of "miles per gallon."