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Triple Ink Shoot-Out : Callifolio Cassis vs Diamine Earl Grey vs Sailor chu shu A couple of weeks ago I did a review of Sailor Jentle chu shu, and noticed I had some other purple-grey inks that look fairly similar in writing – Diamine Earl Grey and L’Artisan Pastellier Callifolio Cassis. All three of these inks are lovely, so a comparison is definitely in order. But which two of them to compare? Then @yazeh suggested to throw all three of them in the ring to fight it out. Interesting idea … Enter... the Triple Ink Shoot-Out – a special edition of the usual brutal fight. In five rounds, these three inks must engage in fierce battle to determine who is the winner. Choreographing a one-on-one battle is easy, but how to make it work with three contestants? Well… the triple shoot-out idea immediately brought to mind the iconic gun-fight in the final scene of Sergio Leone’s 1966 masterpiece “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. A memorable spaghetti western with an excellent musical score by Ennio Morricone. The ideal setting for a duel between three great inks. The hot summer sun shines brightly above the totally forgettable town Desierto in New Mexico. The shimmering heat creates wavering pictures of three lone riders that approach from different directions. Dust bowls blow through the only street in town when these strangers meet at the saloon. These are serious hombres that are not to be messed with. Tipping his hat, the tall blond stranger introduces himself – L’Artisan Pastellier Callifolio Cassis (“the Good”). The second rider – clearly a dark and silent type – simply nods his head in acknowledgement. Let’s introduce him: Diamine Earl Grey (“the Bad”). The third rider is the most extravagant of the bunch, and loudly and obtrusively makes his acquaintance: Sailor chu shu (“the Ugly”). Together they head for the saloon, eyeing each other wearily. Three dominant alpha males that come together… that can only mean trouble. A fight is in the air. May the best ink win … Round 1 – First Impressions The three strangers head to the bar. “Whiskey” … “Make that two” … “Tequila”. In one gulp, the glasses get emptied. “Another one”. The barkeep refills the glasses. Gulp … “Another one”. Seems like we are in the middle of a drinking contest, neither man willing to be outdone by the others. All three of these inks make a stellar first impression. Wonderful colours, that look great on paper – both in written text and in swabs. These are inks that can be used for any occasion, both for personal journaling as well as in a business context where they make a great alternative for the more standard blue or black. Also technically solid inks: good contrast with the page, nice and aesthetically pleasing shading, smooth writing. Great looking stuff! In this first round, the three champions give their best, and down their liquor without blinking an eye: Cassis is at heart a grey ink with strong purple undertones that easily surface in swabs. Sailor chu shu is more of a grey-purple, where purple seems to be the base colour but muted and toned down (it gets a bit lost in the picture, but to the naked eye the purple is much more obvious). Earl Grey definitely is the odd one out: a cool blue-grey ink, but also with definite purple undertones. I personally like the looks of this one the best. In swabs, both Cassis and Earl Grey show lots of depth: you can easily see the purple undertones that are prominently there just below the surface. In contrast, chu shu looks a bit flatter – there is that mix of purple and grey, but it’s all at the surface with less of a layered and multi-dimensional feel to it. Bonus points for the first two. Shading is most prominent with Earl Grey and chu shu: strong but well balanced, enhancing your writing with some extra oomph. Cassis shows more subtle shading with a lot less contrast between light and darker parts. The chroma comparison clearly shows that Earl Grey is the odd duckling – a totally different combination of dyes, resulting in a cool grey ink with a subtle purple undertone. Cassis and chu shu share a similar lineage, with chu shu having more purple in the mix. Of these two, I prefer the darker grey looks of the Callifolio ink. All three inks stand up well to one another, with neither of them giving in. They are all technically solid inks, with great looks both in writing and in swabs. Any of them would be a good choice, but the rules of the game demand that we express a preference. For this first round, Diamine Earl Grey must be the winner – it’s overall the best looking of the three. Second place goes to Callifolio Cassis, simply because of its grey-er looks, and that extra depth in the swabs. Sailor chu shu finishes third – not last, because that makes it sound inferior, and that’s certainly not the case. Round 2 – Writing Sample “Ola amigos! Fancy some cards?” Locals and strangers gather around the tables, cards are shuffled, a friendly game of poker starts. Money changes hands until suddenly… five aces on the table… that can’t be right?!? “Cheating bastardos!” Tables get overturned, fists get clenched and a serious brawl develops. The writing sample was done on Rhodia N°16 Notepad with 80 gsm paper. All inks behaved flawlessly, with no feathering and no show-through or bleed-through. With the EF nib, Cassis feels a bit “grippy” on the page, with sub-par lubrication. This improved considerably when using broader nibs. Earl Grey delivers solidly throughout: smooth and well lubricated in all nib sizes, with good contrast and some really nice shading. Sailor chu shu is also excellent, but a touch less smooth than the Diamine ink. At the start of the fight, “the Good” got a blow to the head, but quickly recovers; “the Bad” immediately grabbed a chair and is mostly untouchable. Chu shu “the Ugly” turns out to be a dirty fighter, dealing some serious damage. Overall, a memorable saloon fight that will be the talk of town for many weeks to come. Counting the points, Earl Grey is the clear winner, followed closely by chu shu and Callifolio Cassis. Round 3 – Pen on Paper After the fight, our trio feels no longer welcome in town. “I heard rumours about a stash of gold hidden by a soldier of the Confederates. Let’s move in with the military to find out more. They have a camp just a couple of miles from here.” The threesome mount their horses and depart town. “Last one at the camp buys the cold beers!”… and the race is on. This round allows the batlling inks to show how they behave on a range of fine writing papers. From top to bottom, we have : Clairefontaine Triomphe, Midori, Tomoe River 52 gsm, Paperblanks and Original Crown Mill cotton paper. All scribbling and writing was done with a Lamy Safari B-nib. All our champions did well, with no show-through nor bleed-through. But this round is not about technicalities, it is about aesthetics and beauty. Are the fighters able to make the paper shine ? One thing is immediately apparent: these inks might all share grey & purple, but they have totally different characters. Cassis is a purple-grey with the grey dominating. Earl Grey is a cool blue-grey with a purple undertone and Sailor chu shu is clearly a purple ink but toned down and muted. All three of them look superbly on the high quality papers in this writing sample. Earl Grey’s bronco consistently takes the lead. Wonderful shading, and lots of depth in the swabs. I love the looks of this ink. Next up rides Callifolio Cassis, closely matched by Sailor chu shu. Very close these two, but the darker hue of Cassis looks just a bit better on the page. When looking at crappy paper, we see that all three inks behave unexpectedly well with no visible feathering. There is some bleed-through – as is to be expected with Moleskine – but minimally so with Cassis. So in this race, Callifolio Cassis manages to enter camp just before chu shu. Earl Grey is already sitting at the bar, awaiting his first cold beer… Up to this round, Earl Grey is defnitely in the lead with Cassis and chu shu coming closely behind. I wonder whether the following rounds will change this picture? Round 4 – Ink Properties Given their experience as outdoors-men, the lieutenant asked our trio to tame some broncos. Fierce horses that are not to be trifled with. Given that this will most surely allow them to gain the soldiers’ trust and thus find out more about that stash of gold, our heroes agree. With some soldiers firmly holding the reins of the semi-wild horses, our heroes mount the saddle. Once the reins are released, the buckling starts… The inks have drying times in the 15 to 20 second range, with chu shu being the faster drying ink. On the smudge test, the text always remains easy to read, but with the Callifolio ink a lot of the dyes are rubbed off. The droplet test is the most conclusive: Earl Grey shows no water resistance at all, while chu shu easily survives a 15 minute soak in water. Some of the dyes get displaced, but what remains on the paper is certainly easy to read. Cassis retains just enough ink to be able to reconstruct your writing. After only a few seconds, Earl Grey is thrown from his bronco … not a good show! After a minute or so, Cassis’ bronco starts rolling on the ground, and “the Bad” must quickly jump aside in order to avoid getting crushed. But Sailor chu shu demonstrates his prowess and remains firmly in the saddle, calming the bristling horse until it follows his every command. Nicely done! The outcome leaves no doubt: chu shu solidly wins this round in spades. And Earl Grey is the obvious loser – horse-taming is clearly not his forte. Round 5 – The Fun Factor Welcome to the final round. Here I give you a purely personal impression of the three inks, where I judge which of them I like most when doing some fun stuff like doodling and drawing. And for this round, these inks are simply amazing. I did the drawing on HP Advanced Photo paper. The background uses heavily water-diluted ink. The flowers were added with a glass dip pen and pure ink. Their investigations led our trio of inks to a forgotten graveyard and a nameless tomb. Within lies buried the stash of gold. But which of them will take the treasure home? In the spirit of Christmas, they decide that instead of simply trying to kill one another, they will demonstrate their prowess with the revolver by shooting at canteens instead. Each will throw a canteen in the air and try to hit it as often as possible. Three… two… one… go! All three inks masterfully show their purple undertones that easily surface when drawing. Choosing between the inks will be difficult. The revolvers blast, and the canteens get a real pummeling, careening through the air with each solid hit. Unexpectedly, Sailor chu shu shows some really nice red-pink undertones surfacing among the more dark purple hues. Really nice. Cassis is also a really nice drawing ink, with more grainy grey showing in the drawing. I really liked the warmth showing in both these ink drawings. Earl Grey looks great, but looks a bit too cold compared to the other two. After the canteens have fallen to the ground, we start counting holes. Three holes for Earl Grey, four for Cassis and a whopping 6 solid hits for Sailor chu shu. By all rights, the gold is his! The Verdict All three inks in this shoot-out are winners in my book. But a choice has to be made, and so I will tally up the points as they were gained in each round: L’Artisan Pastellier Callifolio Cassis: 2 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 9 points Diamine Earl Grey: 3 + 3 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 11 points Sailor Jentle chu shu: 1 + 2 + 1 + 3 + 3 = 10 points The heroes of our story have been through a lot together – chu shu therefore decides to split up the loot. After all, there’s enough gold for the three of them! And even though the points indicate that Diamine Earl Grey is the ultimate winner of this triple shoot-out, the difference in outcome is small. Each one of these inks is a solid and beautiful one. You owe it to yourself to try at least one of them. Satisfaction guaranteed! Best wishes to you all for a splendid 2025 !

Diamine – Earl Grey The ink maker from Liverpool is one of the staple brands in ink-land. They consistently produce solid inks for a very reasonable price. In 2017, Diamine teamed up with the Reddit community to produce a special-edition ink – Earl Grey. This ink colour was chosen by the members of the r/fountainpens group, a wonderful Reddit community of fountain pen enthousiasts. LizEF’s EFNIR review mentioned in the comments that the ink’s colour doesn’t look anything like the tea. Well… this triggered me to do my own examination. In writing, this Diamine ink lays down a dark grey line, slightly purple-leaning. There’s indeed nothing there that resembles the tea. But… if you look at the ink’s chromatography, you’ll discover some unexpected complexity: there’s a lot going on here… grey, purple, cyan-blue, green… a whole kaleidoscope of colours. And these colours do reappear when you look at dry Earl Grey tea, which also shows a dark shimmer of these same colours. For me, that’s good enough to approve the choice of this ink’s name. Diamine Earl Grey writes wet and well saturated. While writing, there is a green tinge to the ink, which disappears when the ink dries, leaving a dark grey line. Saturation is very good – this ink can easily be used with the whole nib range, from EF to B and beyond. But I also noticed some technical issues: Earl Grey has a tendency to feather and bleed on quite a number of papers, mainly the cheaper ones. With high-quality and/or hard-surface paper, the ink works really well. It’s on the more absorbent paper that I noticed some real problems. Also, for some reason, this ink loves to stain my fingers. Every time I opened the bottle, I got ink on my hands – even when I was extra careful. Not sure why… To illustrate the colour span of this Diamine ink, I did a swab on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper, where I really saturated portions of the paper with ink. Earl Grey has a fairly narrow colour span, without much contrast between the light and darker parts. This translates to soft shading when writing. Shading is prominently there, starting with F nibs and above. Due to the narrow colour range, it never gets harsh – exactly the way I like it. On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – the ink behaved perfectly, with very limited smearing. Water resistance is totally absent though – both with still and running water. With Earl Grey, you cannot survive watery accidents. This is also apparent from the lower part of the chromatography – almost no dyes remain attached to the paper. As such, not a good ink to use at the office. A pity, because the ink’s colour and saturation would translate well to a work environment. The chroma clearly shows the complexity of the dye mix. Who would have guessed that this combination of dyes translates to a dark grey colour? I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. On each scrap of paper I show you: An ink swab, made with a cotton Q-tip 1-2-3 pass swab, to show increasing saturation An ink scribble made with a Lamy Safari M-nib fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a Lamy Safari B-nib A small text sample, written with the Lamy Safari M-nib Source of the quote, written with a Pelikan M405 Stresemann with cursive italic F-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) The multi-paper writing test shows Earl Grey’s biggest weakness. This ink only works well with certain types of paper. You really need hard-surface paper for best results. Otherwise you will get some feathering and show-through/bleed-through. This Diamine ink definitely won’t cooperate with the cheaper copy paper you find at the office! Earl Grey is a bit snobbish – with a definite preference for high-quality paper. Drying times for this ink are in the 5-10 second range with a Lamy Safari M-nib. Because scans don't always capture an ink's colour and contrast with good precision, I also add a few photos to give you an alternative look on this Diamine ink. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing (written on Rhodia N°16 80 gsm paper). All samples were written with a Lamy Safari. I also added a visiting pen: a Pelikan M405 Stresemann with a nice cursive-italic F-nib. On the hard-surfaced Rhodia paper, Earl Grey looks really nice, and can handle all nib sizes without a problem. Shading is hinted at with the EF-nib, but is definitely present with F-nibs and above. Related inks To compare Diamine Earl Grey with related inks, I use my nine-grid format with the currently reviewed ink at the center. This format shows the name of related inks, a saturation sample, a 1-2-3 swab and a water resistance test – all in a very compact format. Earl Grey is a bit on the blue-purple side, and looks like a slightly more saturated version of Callifolio Gris de Payne. Inkxperiment – Wheel of Time As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. I find this to be a fun extension of the hobby, and these single-ink drawings often present a real challenge. These inkxperiments allow me to explore the colour-range nuances that are present in the ink. I love doing them! Inspiration for this drawing comes from the cycle of life. While recently playing with the 3 and 5 year old youngest members in the family, I couldn’t help but notice two things: 1/ their world is huge and full of wonder – a trip to the playground is an adventure, the small cluster of trees at the end of the garden a strange and unexplored continent. And 2/ - time is stretched out for a child - when you are constantly discovering new things and experiences, hours can seem like days. While growing older, a subtle change takes place, and spacetime seems to shrink: your world appears to grow smaller, and time has a tendency to fly… I tried to capture these aspects in Earl Grey’s inkxperiment. I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper. I covered the paper with a kitchen towel, and dripped some water-diluted Earl Grey on it. The ink separated in its component dyes, that colour the underlying photo paper. This produced a really nice background, with grey, purple and green colour tints. Quite surprising… I had expected a greyish background, not the kaleidoscope of colours that you can see. I next used different sized glass jars to stamp in the life circles. The scenes in the circles and the background details were painted in with a combination of B-nibbed fountain pen and glass dip pen. The end result gives you a good idea of the colour range that can be achieved when using Earl Grey in a more artistic context. An interesting ink to draw with! Conclusion Diamine Earl Grey looks like a fairly standard dark grey when writing. The ink definitely prefers high-quality paper, and doesn’t tolerate the cheaper papers in my test set. With the right paper, Earl Grey is a pleasure to use, writing wet and nicely saturated, and working well with all nib-sizes. But it’s when using this ink for drawing that the magic happens: Earl Grey contains within a kaleidoscope of colours that simply don’t surface in everyday writing. An unexpected pleasure that - for me - lifts this dark grey above the crowd. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types

Put them next to other colours and they're just grey; put them next to each other and the differences become pronounced. In this scan you can see my current selection of grey inks next to each other: Diamine Silver Fox (my basic clear grey, the one I chose over Diamine Grey and Herbin Gris Nuage), Diamine Earl Grey (the new kid on the block that triggered this new exploration), Iroshizuku fuyu-syogun and Diamine Graphite (an ink that I had tried and abandoned but with fond memories that made me get a new 30 ml bottle). I've given up trying to correct scans and monitors concerning colour but the above scan seems alright on my computer, except for the hues of Earl Grey and Graphite, which appear too bluish. The following photograph is a bit darker but closer to the colours I see in daylight. I hope this quick comparison helps anyone looking for a grey ink. It has reaffirmed my own preference for Silver Fox as the clearest grey but I'm quite taken with the shading of Earl Grey. All four inks are well-behaved, even in my often temperamental Pilot Capless pens.

The good people of r/fountainpens - a fountain pen community on Reddit - reached out to our friends at Diamine if they would be up for a challenge. Could they make an ink purely voted for by the community? Long story short - Reddit asked and Diamine delivered Voting and comments got pretty heated - as you can imagine ink discussions do. After submitting the name, colour & shade Diamine got to work and provided few swatches which we voted for again...few weeks later Diamine Earl Grey was born Grey is a fantastic ink to use - you won't find a regular ballpoint/rollerball in such colour. Earl Grey ink is not too loud, so it can be used for almost everything. Very universal, slightly understated, but certainly not boring. Those purple accents are really eye catchy, especially on white paper They do take a while to come out - we had to re-take the photographs because the colour has changed over night. The flow is very good, it is certainly not dry. Earl Grey shades extremely well. This ink is not waterproof or water resistant. We could only see a little bit of sheen on ink drops which were done on Tomoe River paper. This ink will be available soon in Diamine's 80ml bottles. The packaging has a secret message printed inside the box regarding the Reddit community.