PU vs Melamine Polish: Which Finish for Your Wardrobes?

On the day it is finished, a good melamine polish and a good PU polish look close to identical. The difference shows up in year two, on the surfaces your hands actually touch.

The straight comparison

Why spray beats hand application

The product matters less than how it goes on. A brush drags, leaving visible strokes and an uneven film thickness that catches light differently across the panel. A compressor-fed spray gun atomises the coat so it levels itself flat.

On a wardrobe shutter, that difference is visible from across the room. It is the single clearest indicator of whether a finish was done by a specialist or a general painter.

If a contractor quotes polishing but has no compressor, you are getting a hand-applied finish at a spray-finish price.

What good preparation looks like

1. 1Machine sanding through progressive grit stages, not a single pass.
2. 2Grain filling, so the pores do not telegraph through the topcoat.
3. 3A sealer coat, cut back once cured.
4. 4Multiple thin sprayed topcoats with full cure time between them.

Rushing the cure between coats is what produces orange-peel texture — that faint dimpling you see on cheap polished furniture. It cannot be fixed afterwards without stripping back.

Ask for a sample on your own wood

Sheen looks completely different on oak, teak and commercial ply, and different again under warm versus cool lighting. Any polisher worth booking will finish a small hidden panel of your actual furniture so you can judge it in your own room before committing the whole job.