Lakur Enhanced Colour by Londontown Swatches and Review

Lately I have been in a serious bold-finish mood, and I was excited when I got down to testing four vibrant colors from Lakur Enhanced Colour by Londontown! My package also included their Kur: Protective Top Coat and Kur: Instant Smudge Fix. These are prestige, boutique products, priced at $16 for nail lacquer, $14 for Instant Smudge Fix, and $25 for top coat. Since the prices are higher than most nail products I use, I really wanted to give them a thorough wear testing to see if the performance was there - check out my results after the break!

*sent by the maker for photography and review*

Each square bottle comes in a white glossy box with cutout so you can see the shade. I tend to keep bottles in their original boxes to protect them and for ease of storage and stacking.

I will start off with the gold foil, Best of British. This shade is from their Metallic Collection, which includes foil and shimmer shades. I was not very excited by how it looked in the bottle since gold foils are quite common, but that impression changed once I got it on! This is a beautifully formulated, highly reflective polish that covers in only one to two coats. It dries quickly and wears well. My nails looked like they had hammered gold on them! Note in the macro that the microflakes are of several different colors, giving it some complexity. I tested all of the polishes for stamping, and this one was great. I wore this with the Kur Top Coat and the results were excellent.

Cheeky Noir is another polish from the Metallic Collection, a black foil. This had a similar formula to Best of British. I tested this polish with an indie top coat, and while it wore well, I could definitely see that the Kur Top Coat was plumper-looking and dried harder than the indie.

Emerald Tower is a British racing green creme, shown here in two thin coats. This has a perfect formula, quick-drying, smooth and shiny! This would be nice for nail art because it is so opaque. For the cremes I returned to the Kur: Protective Top Coat, which showed good self-leveling and smoothness over a dark creme.

Finally, I have Londoner Love. This is a light cadmium red creme. I wore it in two thin coats, but it is easily a one-coater. It has a slightly squishy jelly effect. As with any pigmented red, you want to be careful to avoid getting it on dry skin as you paint.

I I also tried some sample stamping with these polishes and they do all stamp! The plates I used were Bundle Monster BM-XL05 and BM-XL06.

I also tried the Kur: Instant Smudge Fix. This comes in a normal polish bottle and has a formula similar to thinner. It works by slightly dissolving the surface so it can re-level after a smudge. It will not work if a polish has a dry surface skin but can smooth out fresh smudges. Below I touched one of my fingers on a wet nail, a frequent mishap of mine.

After using the Instant Smudge Fix, you can see that the surface is more leveled but it did dilute the base color a bit. However, with a second coat of polish you would not be able to see any flaws since the formerly pushed together, wet polish was more evenly spread out.

Finally I would like to talk about the Kur: Protective Top Coat, which was actually the highlight of all the Lakur products I tried! I wore each of these polishes as a full mani, and three out of four of them with the Protective Top Coat. It had a plump quality and dried hard - this helped the manis look glossy and wear well. On a swatch test on paper, it also did a great job of filling in glitters, even once dry! 

I have a bad habit of grinding my thumb nail into my computer mouse, which normally chips my polish after a day - when I wore the Protective Top Coat with these lacquers, nothing happened to my thumb nail, but when I wore a different top coat with Cheeky Noir, the top coat started to lift. I photographed all of these polishes just before I left for a two week trip and that gave me an opportunity away from the blog to do wear testing, including going through airports with carryons, a frequent breakage trigger for me. Londoner Love lasted three days before my airport travel caused my underlying nail to peel, but I re-applied an indie polish to do a wear test with that and the Protective Top Coat. It lasted seven days, even through my return air travel with not the slightest hint of a scratch or flake! This has never happened before - the most wear I have gotten in my life was six days on one mani. I finally removed the polish not because it failed but because I had grow-out, had returned home, and needed to start generating new blog content. 

So $25 is a lot to drop on a top coat, I know, but the performance here was impressive! I will definitely be keeping some on hand for when I travel as it really is a long-wearing top coat. 

Overall I would say that every one of the polishes and treatments performed as one would hope from a high-quality boutique brand. Based on my experience with these six products, I trust their formula to provide a good value across the shade range. They were all very opaque in few coats, smooth, quick-drying, shiny, and wore well. 

*sent by the maker for photography and review*

Londontown, a boutique polish brand, offers Lakur Enhanced Color and the Kur system of treatments, base, and top coats. The products are 9-free and infused with vitamins, minerals, and flower oils from Britain.