What Is Enamel Paint? (2024)

Enamel paint is often thought of as hard, glossy, and used in sparing quantities, much like fingernail polish. Enamel paint is used to add vivid colors and durability to small crafts. Around the home, enamel paint is used for touching up appliances, refurbishing grilles, or painting metal railings. While enamel paint may have a few qualities similar to oven-fired enamel, they are not the same products.

Learn a few basics about enamel paint, the paint that forms a hard shell and provides reliable protection, even in extreme conditions.

What Is Enamel Paint?

Enamel paint is defined more by its qualities than by its content. In the broadest sense, enamel paint means any solvent-based paint that dries to a hard, vitreous-like (or, glass-like) shell. Solvent-based paints are also called oil-based paints, in contrast with water-based paints.

Yet enamel paint bears little similarity to the enamel of molten glass, as there is no glass content in this kind of paint. Even traditional baked enamel finishes, long used for vehicles, have nothing to do with glass. Baking is simply a fast route to eliminating solvents and VOCs.

Air-dry enamel paints are far softer than true enamels formed in a kiln. Paint manufacturers have further widened the definition by sometimes attaching the word enamel to water-based paints, thus losing the one ingredient that usually ties together all enamel paints: solvents.

Powder coating has largely replaced baked enamel coating for industrial applications. However, enamel paint's main competition came when synthetic latex paints were introduced after World War II. Today, enamel paint still has some associations with hard-shelled items such as large appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, though these too are now powder-coated. By contrast, acrylic is a water-based paint that is eco-friendly and more affordable, but it's not as durable or long-lasting as enamel.

Where to Use Enamel Paint

Brush, roll, or spray enamel paint on home projects that either require ultra-durability or a glassy, glossy look. Some popular uses for enamel paint include outdoor elements, door trim, and indoor appliances:

Refurbishing a Barbecue Grill

Enamel paint is used as a highly weather-resistant paint for barbecue grills. Thoroughly clean the outer surfaces of your barbecue grill. Remove the grill rack. Coat the barbecue grill twice with heat-resistant enamel paint, using spray paint in a can.

Painting a Steel Door

Steel entry doors provide security and long-lasting climate protection for exteriors. But this protection is dependent on the condition of the steel exterior veneer. Keep steel entry doors in perfect conditon by painting them with enamel paint.

Painting Door Casing

Door casing gets a lot of abuse. So it makes sense to apply a highly durable paint that is also easy to clean. Clean the door casing with trisodium phosphate (TSP). Mask the wall area around the casing by taping sheet plastic with painter's tape or use self-sticking masking film. Cover the floor with a drop cloth. Apply a minimum of two coats of enamel paint with a high-quality brush to the door casing.

Revitalizing Outdoor Furniture

The colors on even hardy resin outdoor furniture can fade after enough time. Colorful enamel paint in a spray can helps to bring that furniture back to life. Use a pressure washer set to low pressure, or use a water hose, soft brush, and mild detergent to clean the furniture. Let the furniture completely dry, then spray it with two coats of enamel paint.

Touching up Kitchen Appliances

Touch up chips and small scratches in refrigerators and stovetops with small bottles of appliance enamel paint. Liquid enamel paint is nearly as hard as the baked-on enamel coating.

Other Uses for Enamel Paint

• Doors
• Window trim
• Cabinets
• Crown molding
• Window sashes
• Porches
• Floors
• Decks
• Handrails
• Cabinet fixtures
• Washers and dryers

Enamel Paint's Compatible Materials

One of the standout features of enamel paint is that it adheres to a wide range of materials, from slick to porous:

• Glass
• Aluminum
• Galvanized steel
• Stainless steel
• Caulking
• Wood
• Plastic
• Porcelain
• Ceramic

Enamel Paint Origins

At a time when paints were less than reliable and whitewash paints were friable and known to smudge off, attaching the word "enamel" to a paint imparted great meaning to users in the mid-1800s.

Up to the 1840s, enamel paint was thought of in terms of small items like watches and jewelry. In the 1850s and 1860s, enamel paint shifted gears and was promoted as an "anti-corrosion" or "iron preserving agent" for iron railings, wood barns, stone, stucco, fences, and other high-impact outdoor elements.

Around the same time, enamel was associated in consumers' minds with the vitreous shell surfaces of porcelain and ceramic tiles, or of porcelain bathroom fixtures. These are products that many potential buyers knew well from experience. Since porcelain bath fixtures were fairly cutting edge, the concept carried great meaning—even for consumers who didn't actually own the product.

Enamel products were impermeable, sanitary, and very tough. Translating the idea of cookware, tile, sinks, and bathtub enamel to paint was a convenient shortcut to indicate that this paint was equally water-resistant and tough.