How to Beat Water Damage
Spoiler: The key is not rice.
The new site is just coming online and I want to complete a third blog post for the launch. So, this is going to be a quick, and hopefully helpful explanation of tempered glass.
What is it?
It’s just that, glass. The easiest way to grasp the concept of tempered glass is to picture an old medieval blacksmith hammering away on some metal. He heats up the metal, he bangs on it a lot, and then he heats it back up and bangs on it some more. Essentially, what he is doing is compacting the metal. Compacting the metal rids it of imperfections, makes it smaller, and makes it stronger. This is more or less what’s happening during the creation of tempered glass (although we create tempered glass chemically, not with an anvil and forge). We’re making it smaller, and more importantly, stronger.
Yea, Okay. So, what is it?
Okay, so it’s not just glass. It’s actually several (4+) layers of materials. Tempered glass is always going to have a base layer that is absorbent, adhering silicon. Next is a layer of PET film (the stuff they make soda bottles out of). On top of that is the actual tempered glass. And lastly, is an oleophobic coating (oleophobic = fancy word for fingerprint resistant).
Alright, enough of that, what does it do?
Tempered glass works in two ways.
First, it takes all of the scratches and dings that your normal phone glass would soak up. Without the tempered glass, these dings would slowly compromise the integrity of your phone’s glass, making it more and more likely to break the more damaged it became. With the tempered glass, your phone’s glass stays pristine while the tempered glass absorbs all of those scratches and dings.
Second, tempered glass provides shock absorption. The best way to understand this effect is to consider how much effort it takes to tear a sheet of paper vs a stack of 20 sheets of paper. The thicker your glass effectively is, the higher degree of shock it can withstand. It really is that simple.
Is it guaranteed to work?
No. While it is the best protection we can apply to our screens, unfortunately, it’s still glass, and glass is not unbreakable — yet. That said, it still does a great job of protecting your phone’s glass and it is becoming more common to have a tempered glass screen protector on your phone,than to not.
