New Ink Review: Diamine Caramel Sparkle Shimmer 2016

November 2, 2016

I've heard that the release date for these new inks is 4th November; Fountain Pen Day, so I'm posting separate reviews for them on here. I assume they will come in the same type of bottles as the previous set of shimmer inks, but I haven't seen the retail bottles yet.

Currently I only have samples that Diamine very kindly sent me to test, and to review 'if I wanted to', but I've noticed that my samples don't need much shaking to mix the particles in, and the pens need very little shaking once they are filled.
Generally speaking, I found all 12 of these new shimmer inks to be wetter than all of the other shimmer inks I have used.
I have had these inks in these pens for over 2 weeks now. Every pen/ink combination has started straight away without a problem, and I have experienced no stopping or skipping.
Some take longer to dry than others, and a couple just soaked into the paper straight away. The most saturated inks will show through and bleed through on cheap paper.
None of them are waterproof inks.

Diamine Shimmer Caramel Sparkle is a caramel/terracotta ink similar to Diamine Terracotta but it looks slightly more yellow. It's a quite saturated ink and has gold shimmer. The gold shimmer shows up easily. I used a Stipula that has a M nib and I had no trouble seeing the gold effect. This one is quite wet and took longer to dry than some of these inks.

The first picture is a scanned review form, and the second is a photo. These have been adjusted with Photoshop to get the colour you see to look as close as possible to the actual ink colour.