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Showing results for tags 'permanence'.
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My understanding is that fountain pen inks are either dye-based or pigment-based. Pigment inks are generally water-resistant if not waterproof; dye-based inks, generally speaking, are easily washed away by water (exceptions being iron gall and Noodlers inks, which afaik are dye-based but contain chemical additives of one kind or another which bind with or eat into the paper, rendering your writing water resistant even if some of the dye washes away). Dye-based inks are generally easy to manage; pigment inks and chemically-augmented dye-based inks have, to a greater or lesser degree, liabilities which make them trickier or riskier to use than standard dye-based inks (e.g. Bay State Blue somehow dissolved some of the plastic in a Kaweco slide-converter over the course of a year; KWZ IG Blue #1 completely gummed up the feed of a Lamy Safari when I left it in a drawer unused for a month; etc.). But I have learned through experimentation that if you add a small amount of a waterproof ink to a larger amount of dye-based ink, 4 times out of 5 the mixture will have enough water resistance for most practical purposes (i.e. it will preserve your writing if your notebook gets hit with a spilled drink, but I suppose you wouldn't want to use it for whatever it is artists do with fountain pens + watercolor paints and so forth) and also be less prone to generate the problems associated with the original waterproof ink. The obvious drawbacks to this approach are that ~20% of the time (ymmv) you get some kind of chemical reaction that wrecks the ink or even the pen, and that mixing inks makes refilling your pen a somewhat messier and more time consuming process than it would be otherwise. So why don't manufacturers just add a little bit of pigment to dye-based inks to make them more permanent? And why do so many pigment inks have to be so densely pigmented that they create clogging/hard start problems (e.g. R&K Lilly is a neat color, but in my experience it's basically unusable unless you want to constantly prime the feed and rinse the nib every other day -- by contrast, 50% R&K Lilly + 50% J. Herbin Lie de The works just fine as an everyday drawing/writing ink)? The either/or approach seems completely counterintuitive to me. Or am I completely mistaken about some/all of the above (which tbc is entirely possible 💁♂️)?