There is no one "best" finish that you can put on a pen. Everything is a compromise. Do you want the soft warm feel of wood or the cold hard feeling of a plastic? Do you want the soft glow of polished wood, or the glare of polished plastic? Do you want a hard brittle finish that is durable to wear of everyday use, but easilly shattered by impact, or chipps if it is dropped? Do you want a finish that is difficult to repair, or one that is easy to repair? All of these things are available in the finish we put on a pen, but there is no finish that will give us all of them at the same time.
All finishes, even bare wood, can be polished to achieve a gloss that approaches that of a piece of glass. The difference is in how long that appearance will last.
Wax will give minimum protection to the wood, and it will have the softest and warmest feeling of anything except bare polished wood. but it will be the least durable to wear. The gloss of a wax will disappeaer from its exposure to air. But it is the easiest of all finishes to apply and renew.
CA glue will give the most durable finish we can put on a piece of wood. However, it can be the most difficult of all finishes to apply. Just read all of the questions and problems with it we see on this forum, and all of the different ways we achieve the same end. CA glue is encapsulating the wood in the hardest most brittle plastic we could use. It is as close to coating the wood with glass as we could come without actually using glass.
Polyurethane resins comes close, but they can also be difficult to apply with adhesion problems to the wood and to itself when multiple coats are used. Like CA, it is difficult, if not impossible to repair.
Lacquer will be the hardest of the conventional finishes that we can use, if we are willing to wait long enough for all of the solvents to evaporate, and that can take from weeks to months. Not waiting is the biggest problem that we can have with a lacquer. Lacquer is also a plastic that is a close relative of photographic film (celluloid). Lacquer will have a warmer feeling that the harder plastics.
Shellac is the least durable of the natural finishes, and the things that are added to the friction polishes to make them easier to use, also make them less durable than pure shellac. Being a natural product, shellac has the warmest feeling of any of the finishes other than wax. However, it is the least durable of the finishes, other than wax, that we can put on a pen.
So the question becomes one of whether you want a pen with a finish that looks nice and feels nice today, but has a limited life; or do you want a pen the looks nice, feels like cold plastic today, but stays that way for a long time.
