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Earlier in 2020, Diamine released the 25 ink colours that it produced and included in its Inkvent (2019 advent calendar) product as separate retail products in four-legged 50ml Blue Edition bottles. The inks in the series are categorised as standard, sheening, and shimmering — and each is priced accordingly. Seasons Greetings is one of the sheening inks. Base colour: Dark teal Flow: Moderate Feathering: Not observed on Rhodia Dotpad 80g/m² paper, looking closely at the thinnest hatching lines, and words/glyphs ‘reverse-written’ with the nib upside-down (i.e. the bottom of the feed facing up) Show-through: Low to nil Bleed-through: Not observed Drying time: A smidgen over 20 seconds Smudging after fully dry: A small amount; this ink is slightly susceptible to being re-wetted by the moisture on one's fingertips. I rubbed my dry thumb over the stippling dots (just after the scan shown above was done), and that caused some very minor streaking that took a loupe to spot. However, just now when I was handling the ink review sheet over 48 hours later, I managed to smudge some of smaller Japanese characters Water resistance: So apparently poor that I don't think I need to soak some part of the sheet for an hour or so Shading: Negligible. In spite of the apparent shading in the image above, the darker parts are actually manifestations of sheen; see image below. (I confirmed it by checking the ink review sheet under a loupe and a bright LED lamp.) Sheen: Plenty of pink sheen, evident in almost every ink mark on the page, other than the thinnest and driest of the hatching lines I did by ‘reverse-writing’ (with nib upside-down and the bottom of the feed facing up) which apparently this pen-and-ink combination, or maybe just the pen, doesn't support Shimmer: None My thoughts: Now that I have detected a bit more susceptibility to smudging with this ink, I might have to rethink whether I feel comfortable using it to write in my journals and notebooks of which the content I intend to revisit. Nevertheless, the degree of smudging doesn't seem to be quite as severe as with some other Diamine (ultra-)sheening inks such as Iridescink Herbert or November Rain.

Is anyone here planning on getting this year's Diamine Inkvent (Red edition) calendar? Instead of twenty-four 7ml bottles of ink, this time it comes with twenty-four 12ml bottles. The twenty-fifth bottle is still 30ml. Both Cult Pens and La Couronne du Comte have already added the product to their catalogues and taking pre-orders, and LCdC covered it in its newsletter sent out yesterday. Cult Pens says, ”Expected September”; whereas LCdC says “Available October 2021”. Given past performance, I know which retailer I'd go with, given their track records of delivery, if I wanted a jump on everyone else to review the inks on social media. Except I won't be ordering it at all. May as well sit back, wait for others to do the reviews, and then only buy specific colours in large bottles as standalone products, when they're released in several months' time.

The inks are released in full bottles of 50ml, the shimmer inks priced at €10.95 and the normal at €7.95. See the bottles and ink swabs here https://www.lacouronneducomte.nl/webstore/main/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=diamine%20ink-vent&language=nl&utm_source=nieuwsbrief20200319&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=diamine_inkvent_nl Saw it first by lurking on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/fl5nsc/diamine_inkvent_released_as_full_size_bottles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/fl5kxz/diamine_release_2019_inkvent_calendar_inks_in/

Diamine launches the 2019 Inkvent Calendar today. As I understand, it will available broadly at £67. The Calendar is made up of a mixture of standard, shimmer and sheening inks and festive colours created for the calendar as follows: 24x 7ml and 1x 30ml inks. The unis are well behaved, easy to use and clean. I will upload photos shortly, in the meantime, they can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B3FCm3zjkxX/?igshid=nv76alm4erjx