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I've just purchased a bottle of Sailor Jentle Ink called "Doyou" which means mid-summer in Japanese. It's one of the eight inks of their "Colours of Four Seasons" line. Many people like Oku-yama and Yama-dori of this line, and this Doyou one is relatively rare and I was not able to find many reviews of it. I want a darker colour but not totally (boring) black, so I went for Doyou. This is my first review (here or anywhere). I hope I've done it right. It comes with a 50ml bottle with a "reservoir": flip the bottle upside-down before inking the pen and the ink will stay in a small "cone" which makes it easier to fill. When written with a finer nib, Doyou is a dark brown colour which could be mistaken as black without side-by-side comparison with a black ink. But if you look carefully you'll see it's a warm brown with a hint of red. This may refer to the colour of land in a hot summer day I guess? I think it's an understated colour suitable for work if you don't want to use a boring black. It dries fairly fast, no feathering or bleedthrough on Rhodia paper. With fine nibs there is virtually no shading though. It's a rather wet ink in my Pilot VP. The swabs show a less darker colour with a tiny bit shading. In the smear test I ran a wet finger across it twice. It leaves a red-brownish trace and you can still see the lines very clearly. The drip test shows that it has quite a decent waterproofness. All in all I think I quite like this ink. I don't have a black ink at hand for comparison, so I used the darkest (the least bright) colour available to me, which is R&K Salix, for a comparison. I have also a few words in R&K Scabiosa in my "ink journal" so I took a picture of it and put it side by side with Doyou as a comparison. Scabiosa has more of a purple hint to it. This is my first review and any suggestion or advice is welcomed! Some close-ups:

I have a bit of a hangup for permanent inks, and this is often at odds with my passion for vintage pens. Do you think I'm going to take apart a Parker Vacumatic, clean it, replace the diaphragm, admire the clarity of the barrel that has survived for 70 or 80 years, and then fill it with Heart of Darkness? No. That is not happening. I love HoD, but that goes into modern pens that I don't really give a darn about. Inks with no water resistance are uninteresting to me. Yes, I have a bottle of Waterman Serenity Blue. It's used for dip tests after I refurbish a pen, but there is no way I would write in my journal with it, the audience for my journal is my family, but a hundred years from now. Dr. Murphy would assert that it's basically impossible for a journal to survive a hundred years without being subjected to some spillage of liquid, and the likelihood of spillage is probably higher around me, considering the amount of coffee I consume daily. So... First, I'd like to know your opinions on the 2 inks that I do use: Platinum Blue Black (the regular ole' dye-based version, not the pigment-based version) and Platinum Forest Black (good old iron gall, which I assume was used a good bit on any older pen before I got to it). Is there any sound reasoning or scientific evidence that would tell us not to trust these two inks in my vintage pens? Next, I'm looking for a black. As stated, I have Heart of Darkness, but I just couldn't put that into an old Vac. I have a bottle of Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black that came included in an eBay auction, and I probably will never open it, not in all my life, because it's not permanent at all. What if the ancient Egyptians had used such junk to write on their papyrus? What if the ancient scribes had used impermanent ink to copy the Torah? Imagine all the culture we would have lost to the eons. My current options for black inks are: "GRAF VON FABER-CASTELL CARBON BLACK DE ATRAMENTIS ARCHIVE INK DE ATRAMENTIS DOCUMENT INK - BLACK" To be clear, I'm open to hearing about any permanent inks that will not kill the rubber internals or celluloid walls of old pens. When I say "permanent," I don't mean "eternal and unmoving," but it would be nice to know that if it falls into a river and I fish it out, that what is left when I dry the paper will still be legible. Your suggestions?