Search the Community

Initially, I wasn't much interested in sheening inks. My first exposure was seeing photos of Emerald of Chivor and I wasn't overly impressed (and I realize that's shimmery, in addition to sheeny, so not quite the same thing). I thought "yeah, that would be cool for, like, party invitations and such" but for everyday use? That'd be like RuPaul getting all done up just to take out the trash. Of course, when I finally got some decent paper (something better than the cheap copy I normally use) and experienced sheen for myself (Lamy Coral), my interest was piqued. I discovered that sheen is not always immediately apparent: you write with a pen you haven't used in a while and you say, "wow, look at that sheen! why haven't I noticed that before?" and, when you go back and look at your first tests of that ink, you see that you didn't notice it before because there's nothing there. It's like sheen just magically appeared. This happened to me with Levenger Claret. Other inks, the sheen is pretty subtle - shininess when it dries, shading that looks like a slighty different color; I find this usually with darker inks - Diamine Macassar, KWZI Grapefruit, Platinum Black, Sailor Miruai - as the darkness of the ink makes the sheen effects hard to see. Other inks, the sheen is not so subtle - Sailor Tokiwa-matsu and Yama-dori, for example; the red sheen on these two is pretty obvious as it is such a contrast with the inks' color. Then there are the inks with gold sheen. These are the ones I'm having a problem with - there's just too much darn sheen! There's such a heavy coating of gold on some inks (at least in the pens I'm using them in, and possibly to a lesser extent the paper I'm using) that the color is very dark, almost black in some cases. And using these inks on cheap paper makes them look even worse. Some darkening may be due to evaporation, of course, but I experience the same thing with a fresh inking, as some of the photos show, so it's more than that. First up, Lamy Dark Lilac. This is perhaps the most disappointing to me as the lovely lighter purple that the ink shades to is gone (the main reason I'm considering switching to Gummiberry or Majestic Purple), although testing it in a finer nib might give me the results I'm looking for. This is DL in a P67 medium, this pen has been inked for a couple months at least. Here is the sheen on that, pretty heavy coat. Here it is in a Parker Frontier fine, pen had gone dry so was freshly filled before this sample. And the sheen, coating looks even heavier than the P67. Here is Oku-yama, again freshly filled. And the sheen; again, a solid coating. The ink that started it all for me, Lamy Coral, in a P460. Couple shots of the sheen. Yet here is the Coral in my Pelikan M250 fine. What a lovely color, quite delicate. (Strangely enough, Coral is the only ink of the 5 or 6 I've tested in the 250 so far that actually looks decent.) So, anywho, this has been on my mind recently and just thought I'd share it.