Pelikan Edelstein Olivine

[DrDebG]

Thank you for the great review! That was a lot of work. Thank you for your efforts.

 

I guess I may be in the minority, but I really like the color. To me, it looks very much like the samples I have seen of Olivine. It is a dark green with just very slight hints of brown and yellow as your chromatography shows. But Olivine is much like sapphires - they can come in different shades from light to very dark.

[lapis]

.... But Olivine is much like sapphires - they can come in different shades from light to very dark.

 

Deborah, I agree completely. While I do, as said, like Pelikan in general, and quite often recommend their pens and inks, -- although I don't work for them -- it should be considered that exactly this colour naming can lead one to disappointment. Sapphire is an even better example. To each his own and all that, and it also depends on where you live and what you grow up with but all of the olives I have ever eaten or seen in my life were either black or green. Okay, okay, the black ones often had various pitches of brown in them but the green ones never had more blue than yellow and/or brown. (I think.) As if that weren't enough, the choice Olivine was intended to represent the gem and not the fruit, but the documentation photos there (on gems) weren't so dark blue.

[lapis]

I do have Pelikan 4001 Dark Green - would you say that has more blue than Olivine?

 

As an attempt to see whether or not the Pelikan 4001 series Dark Green has more blue in it than the Olivine does, I diluted both to exactly 1/500th in water.

To the left is Dark Green and to the right is Olivine Edelstein.

 

It's clear that the Dark Green has more blue in it, and that both (still) have some green. Also, both apparently have a touch of brown, but that was not the question.

[Torrilin]

That price chart is really helpful. A lot of the higher end inks have pretty similar prices in USD. At the lower end tho, price varies a lot. No wonder so many European pen users use a lot of Pelikan ink. Over here the 30mL Pelikan bottles run about what Lamy 50mL bottles do. And that’s assuming you can find either.

[Rhincodon]

Lapis, my sincere thanks for the further investigation of Olivine. It is definitely different from 4001 Dark Green, which my eyes weren't able to distinguish in the original images. The brown in the chromatography is very interesting! If I can find a good deal, I'll probably get it. I am a sucker for dark greens, and can convince myself they're all juuuuust different enough.

[Honeybadgers]

I'm absolutely buying a couple bottles when I can find it for $16/bottle, because pelikan's US MSRP of almost $30/bottle is just insulting.

 

But god do I love smoky quartz, and I love me some dark, vivid greens.

[migo984]

What disappoints me the most isn’t that it’s a bad colour - it certainly isn’t at all - but that it appears so different to the one that won the Pelikan “design an ink” competition. Or is this supposed to be another ink entirely?

[lapis]

ASAIK this Olivine is"just that", the Olivine "suggestion" which won the rally. It is definitely not another ink instead. (Also, up to now, IMO, the actual colours chosen fit quite nicely to their names.) Maybe Pelikan should have consulted the name-giver first, to ask whether or not he/she were satisfied with Pelikan's mix...

[Jan2016]

Stumbled over this picture:

 

[Jan2016]

And the picture of the color as it was chosen in 2016:

 

[Jan2016]

IMHO they should have chosen Claudia's Andalusite...

 

 

[The Good Captain]

IMHO they should have chosen Claudia's Andalusite...

 

 

This is the colour I was expecting from Pelikan's most recent photographs...!

[migo984]

I understand the fallibilities of packaging printing, but even so the actual ink colour is very different from the colour indicated on the box itself, to the extent that I’d say the box is misleading.

 

Don’t get me wrong, putting aside semantics about the accuracy of the name etc, I quite like the ink. I found it to be very paper dependent, and interestingly I don’t have an ink that’s an exact match for it. It looks “yellow” when set against dark blue-green inks, like Monteverde Green and Conway Stewart Green, but looks much less “olivey” when compared to GvFC Olive, Kobe #40 Kitano Olive and Sailor Epinard. It’s a kind of in-between shade.

[lgsoltek]

Stumbled over this picture:

 

 

 

Somehow this swab above shows a colour that is even bluer, even more different than what they had (mis)led us to believe:

 

[jmccarty3]

IMHO they should have chosen Claudia's Andalusite...

 

 

 

+1

[dragorsi]

Can someone please link me to an archive with all last year's ink entries? I wanted to look them up, but google is not my friend right now. Thanks!

[Intensity]

I usually find olive and teal inks difficult to photograph: the teal and cyan comes out too blue, and olive inks can turn out too brown. I suspect that happened with the swatches linked above where Olivine looks more blue, as the camera of the person who photographed those swatches was picking up the blue more strongly.

 

Regardless, I completely agree, Olivine is a misnomer, and the promotional photograph of the bottle does hint at a more olive-green color than the actual ink ends up being in writing. And beyond that, it's not actually the color of Olivine.

 

My best guess about what happened was as follows:

- a general shade was chosen in a competition

- Pelikan's marketing team came up with a gemstone name closest to the winning shade, which was already only borderline olive.

- Pelikan's ink lab mixed up something that everyone was content with, and it was poured into bottles labeled "Olivine", even though the final ink further diverged toward blue from the winning shade, thus making it pretty much not olive or "Olivine" at all.

- It may have been too late at that point to rename the ink, as "Olivine" was already leaked or announced as a name. I would have personally selected "Emerald" for this ink, if they could revise the name.

 

Emerald (images from google search for "emerald"):

 

 

http://www.gemstone.org/images/news/belmont-mine-emerald-finds.jpg

Edited April 4, 2018 by Intensity

[lapis]

Perfect shots, perfect choice! I myself thought of Emerald too and that's the best thing and/or first thing which came to (my) mind.

A. Emerald has, yes, a touch of blue but not enough to label it a turquoise. And it (Emerald) also has a touch of brown in it. Your shots of emeralds resemble quite nicely the colour to be seen in my dilution (up in Post #23).

B. I agree too that photos of green things are also hard to make (on a lot of cameras) and then also to reproduce (especially on many of our various types of monitors). But that photo of the Olivine dilution in Post #23 is IMO quite good, as a representation of "the real thing" very authentic, practically identical. FWIW taken with my iPhone 5S. The undiluted ink and/or any swabs or any writings on any papers are all too dark, for any name of a green object like olives or emeralds etc. to have been chosen. Also, I of course have the original sample vials -- still full -- and when placed next to my screen ( (acer, but who cares?), the reproduction is more than good. I don't know of any minerals or gemstones or jewels which are such a blackish dark bluish green. Again, no need to complain. Whether or not even only a few of us like the colour itself (and its good maintenance)... it (the ink) and we all would have been better off if it had been given a better name.

 

Whew

[inkstainedruth]

Count me as another person who was mislead by the name and the early photos of the bottles.
If this ink had come out 5 years ago I might have gone "Oh, yeah, I need a green ink." But now? My sense of color choices has evolved, and I know what I like and don't like way better than I did then.

Lapis's comprehensive review has made me not think the ink is completely horrible -- but I'm not going to be going out of my way to buy a bottle of it, either. Edelstein Ameythist and Smoky Quartz? Oh yeah -- those were no brainers. Aquamarine? Ehhh.... It was better than I expected but still not something I'd reach for as a "must have" color. This one I'd really have to see in person -- because it might still lean a little too blue for my taste.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[chromantic]

 

 

Somehow this swab above shows a colour that is even bluer, even more different than what they had (mis)led us to believe:

 

 

Agreed. This was the color I was somewhat eagerly anticipating buying but the swab is nothing like it. I'll spend that money on something else instead.