"ymx-Ink" Brown Gold Review

[sodul]

I have no idea what the brand for this ink is, it says "YMX-INK" on the bottle so I'm using that for the name. Please correct me if you know the actual brand name.

 

 

Other inks:

 

Reverse showing the bleed through:

 

The bottle:

 

Lot's of gold dust (if actual gold):

 

Transfer to a sample vial, the original one makes a mess every time:

 

Cleaning up the mess makes for sparkling tissue paper:

 

A 'golden brown' cat:

I use a Jinhao 911 inked with Hero Carbon Black to draw the lines and the colors are done with water paint brushes. Thornton's pink for the nose and ears, Diamine Purple Pazzazz for the eyes (a dark purple), and this Brown Gold for the rest.

 

[visvamitra]

Never heard about it.

[sodul]

Here are the different shades they sell:

 

I have 6 more colors on the way but it will probably be weeks before I get them: #1 (blue green), #7 (red orange), #16 (mauve), #19 (blue), #23 (turquoise), #24 (light turquoise). I'm guessing the colors from the swabs here. This brown is #21.

 

You can find them under the name "Gold Powder Color Ink For Fountain Dip Pen Calligraphy Writing Painting Graffiti".

[white_lotus]

The gold isn't real gold btw, but gold colored mica flakes (or something similar) that's commonly made these days. Those are the same vials used for the Birmingham Pen Co. ink samples.

 

Though I would worry a bit about using calligraphy ink in a fountain pen.

[sodul]

Though I would worry a bit about using calligraphy ink in a fountain pen.

 

 

I do not recommend to use this in a valuable pen and preferably in a cheap pen that's easy to take apart. The Jinhao 159, X450 and X750 are good candidates because they have very good ink flow and are so easy to deeply clean.

 

Except for the 'gold' powder the ink itself is pretty well behaved and seems to be die based. I do have calligraphy ink that you definitely do not want to put in a fountain pen. I also have a bottle of Yellow Ochre from Winsor & Newton, made in France, that is labeled for Calligraphy & Fountain Pen use ... but I really hate to use it as it seriously clogs the pen quickly. There seems to be a little bit of clogging issue with the powder but nothing too serious. I'll keep my 159 inked for a few days an report back on how it handles settling in the nib and feed.

[lapis]

Thanks for this review. A nice selection of various colours (post #3). I could do without the flakes, though. That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that image and the one of the bottle.

[sodul]

I left my Jinhao 149 alone for almost a week with the YMX-INK in it and at first I was impressed that the pen wrote right away but it dried out very quickly. It turns out that less and less particles come into the feed and just clog the little ink channels before even entering the feed. So not great with the modern feeds, but I think it can do much better with old school ebonite feeds.

 

I've since received the #23 "Turquoise", and the #16 "Gold" bottles and I really like both inks:

 

The glass pen does not do justice to the shading capability of the inks. I've put the #23 Turquoise it in a Noodler's Ahab and wow that's a lot of shading, see the writing sample in the picture, but I've got even better shading on the Optik Paper of my Black n' Red journal. I'm not experiencing any clogging issue even after several days, including at rest. On the other side the unique 'piston' design of the Ahab where a little tube gives extra ink storing capacity also means a lot of the particles are stuck there and no longer contributing to the sparkle load when writing. I loaded the #16 in a vintage Indian eye dropper I recently received and it does pretty well so far.

 

The #16 lays down with a rather 'dirty' shade but dries pretty sparkly, see this small splash test:

 

 

[Chrissy]

The gold or silver particles used in calligraphy inks aren't of nano particle size that is used for fountain pen inks.

 

I wouldn't use any calligraphy ink in a fountain pen. It's really not designed for such use.

[NicolausPiscator]

Thanks for your review. While the brown is too much standard brown for me the dirty green #16 looks quite interesting for my eyes. But I never heard of ymx-Inks.

[sodul]

A few updates on this ink.

 

First I tried my Ahab that I have left sitting for over 2 weeks (Jan 17 until Feb 6) and it wrote right away as if freshly inked. There was no sign of caking of the ink so I think this ink works pretty well with traditional feeds.

 

I also received 4 more of the colors 1 (dark green), 7 (candy red), 19 (navy blue), 24 (light turquoise). You can disagree with the english names, I just mades them up to be easier to reference them and I'm no expert in color names.

 

I only used a glass dip pen but these color also show good potential for shading. They all behaved well on my Daiso dot grid notebook (paper comparable to Rhodia, a little smoother and thinner), but the red did bleed through. Not as much as Apache Sunset would, but enough to be a potential problem.

 

Other vendors are listing similar inks and there are 24 of them to reflect the solar cycles. I got these for $1.09 shipped per bottle but that vendor is running out, the other vendors are around $1.50.