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So, my last Truphae box had a bottle of Noodler's Borealis Black in it. Borealis Black is not really my kind of ink; it feathers a lot on the papers I mainly write on (i.e., bad paper), and it's so heavily saturated that it smears in perpetuity if I write in my 7 Seas Crossfield (Tomoe River paper) with it. I'm pretty satisfied with the selection of daily inks I have (mainly IG inks and Platinum Carbon Black), though, so I felt like it was safe to try improving it. What have I got to lose? I've been reading some old threads about ink dilution, so I got out an old empty LAMY ink bottle and put 20ml of the NBB in there along with 20ml of filtered water. I didn't have any distilled water to hand, so to make up for it I added 1ml of 4% Phenol solution. I finished it off with 1ml of 7th Generation "Powered by Plants" "Clementine Zest & Lemongrass Scent" dish soap. This is a kind of interesting soap (if that's a word that can be applied to dish soap) that contains, among other normal soapy things, glycerin! I figured that would handle the surfactant requirements. But, it also contains some essential oils and acetic acid. So, to be on the safe side, I tried it out with a glass dip pen before loading it into a Jinhao 992 (a nice low-risk pen) I had laying around. Although I was afraid I'd put in too much soap (it got kind of sudsy when I shook the bottle to mix everything up), it seems to have actually worked! It goes down slickety-smooth, dries in 15-20 seconds, and is only marginally more grey out of the Jinhao when compared with stock NBB. With the dip pen it was a bold dark black, just like NBB. It feathers much less, and it doesn't smear at all, even on Tomoe River paper. (Hooray!) Once it's dry, it seems pretty well indistinguishable from Parker Quink, but it feels nicer to write with.

Here is my comparison of 4 Noodler's Inks: Bulletproof Black, Heart of Darkness, Borealis Black, and X-Feather. I used 2 pens, a Parker 21 and a Pilot Metropolitan. The comparison was done on 3 different papers. Enjoy and let me know what you think! Album in link below. http://imgur.com/a/jcnWa