PenBBS Fountain Pen Ink No.178 Rose Quartz – a lazy review

[A Smug Dill]

Here's a weird ink, probably closely comparable to Jacques Herbin Nude By Marc-Antoine Coulon (which I don't have), that I expected and really wanted to like, but in which I'm sadly disappointed by its performance characteristics that make it nigh unusable and useless.

 

Colour: It really does look like rose quartz, at least the globes and other-shaped pieces that I recently saw in an antiques and secondhand knick-knacks store.

 

The colour on the page defies proper capture with my Canon LiDE 300 scanner, in any mode and with a colour calibration reference card by the side of the review sheet. No amount of algorithmic colour correction or other post-processing — within my limited skill as a user of the software — in GIMP could make it look right in the scanned image; it should look far more pink, a bit like the Rose Taupe in the relatively recent ‘first release’ colours of the Sailor Professional Gear Slim Mini pens. The colour shown in the photo of the review sheet is much closer, even before colour correction was applied.

 

However… with each pen stroke, the ink initially goes down looking close to the ‘quick’ broad stroke colour shown in the scan, making it difficult for me to see the exact shape of the mark I just made. Within less than a second, it gets darker, akin to the colour of the ‘3-pass’ patch in the scan, but still more taupe and dull than rose and pink. Then the mark becomes lighter, and finally more pink and (slightly) more vivid over the next several minutes, until it looks like the ink colour shown in the photo.

 

 

Flow: I'm not sure how best to describe this. What I see is the behaviour of a somewhat wet-flowing ink, that somehow produces a very dry writing experience. The ink seems to be very watery, for lack of a better description, and not even remotely lubricating. When I'm ‘drawing’ a minuscule / lowercase 'l’ (or the stem in ‘t’), the vertical stroke looks faint until I lift the pen / nib off the page, and then suddenly a darker taupe colour rushes up to fill the length of the stem, so I must conclude that a fair amount of ink was laid down all along the trajectory of the stroke, but the liquid was easily pushed along the surface of the paper by the nib's tip, and only when the pen is lifted that the glob of ink is allowed to flow in reverse direction up the track of the mark that was made. That makes for a rather unpleasant writing experience.

 

Feathering: Not observed per se on Rhodia Dotpad 80g/m² paper, but lines do ‘spread’ and become slightly thicker than they originally seemed as the ink dries

Show-through: Low to nil, on account of the pale colour

Bleed-through: There is a tiny bit, where two or three passes of the nib was made over a particular spot; probably on account of the ink not providing any lubrication, thus making it likely for a very fine / sharp nib to lightly damage the paper surface on the first pass, and the watery ink then seeps on the second or third pass

 

Drying time: 9–10 seconds

Smudging after fully dry: Didn't happen when I rubbed my thumb over the hatching/stippling panel and the largest Chinese hanzi chharacters

Water resistance: Very poor

 

Shading: Heaps, but not in any manner that I'd deem useful or pleasing

Sheen: None observed (and I checked the ink marks under a loupe)

Shimmer: None

 

My thoughts: I don't mind the light rose taupe colour of the ink once it's dry, but the writing experience is extraordinarily horrible. (I also had the ink in a Kaigelu 316 with a steel F nib that isn't really that fine, and the writing experience with that was very marginally better; but then I had to contend with the lines spreading while the ink is drying on the page.) Maybe there is some use for such an ink in drawing portraits, or muted and faint monochrome images… but not for me.

 

 

[Intensity]

Yes, I feel similarly.  I actually liked the vintagey faded looking color and its hue on paper, I liked using it with a flexible nib and a high-ink-flow pen to get that edge outline look.  But the writing experience was not great, and overall the ink was much too pale for anything but a firehose of a pen.  I ended up not keeping my bottle.  Much much happier now with Colorverse Brunch Date, which is a slightly less pink but far more legible ink.

[yazeh]

Dill, thanks for the review of an ink which, in all honesty doesn't deserve reviewing....

That truly is heroic but ugh what a colour..... I have to go and rinse my eyes

 

 

[Mech-for-i]

I had found that this ink work quite well on Ivory / un-bleached paper , per any pale colour ink, the writing part will be a challenge as it can be difficult to gauge if you had laid down the right line / stroke and this is not just this ink but all pale colour ink

[arcfide]

This seems like the sort of ink that might make a better impression with artists and maybe an eyedropper watercolor brush or the like, as you note. I could see this being a nice color for doing fills of line drawing type work, say, for a comic. 

[A Smug Dill]

16 hours ago, yazeh said:

That truly is heroic but ugh what a colour..... I have to go and rinse my eyes

 

I personally like that kind of colour, well enough to choose it for the colour of the suit I bought for my wedding. Everyone other than my wife thought it was so ‘out there’, but she was there with me when I picked it, and we both loved it. 👍

[yazeh]

9 minutes ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

I personally like that kind of colour, well enough to choose it for the colour of the suit I bought for my wedding. Everyone other than my wife thought was so ‘out there’, but she was there with me when I picked it, and we both loved it. 👍

I don't mind the colour for a shirt or a suit, wedding or not  

 

But as a writing ink, it doesn't work for me....

 

[lgsoltek]

I remember this being one of the Pantone colours of the year. PenBBS releases an ink based on that colour every year.

[A Smug Dill]

I'm looking forward to a fountain pen ink named Salmon from whichever ink manufacturer (but ideally not Noodler's, or hard-to-get-worldwide brands such as Troublemaker).

[chromantic]

The color absolutely matches the name. Otherwise ... no.

[AmandaW]

On 1/8/2021 at 4:48 PM, A Smug Dill said:

I'm looking forward to a fountain pen ink named Salmon

 

Did you see the new Cult Pens exclusive Robert Oster ink 'Tiverton Rust' - it's the closest to salmon I have found in my great Pink Hunt. Unfortunately too new to find reviews it seems so I don't know if it too will be too light to read.

 

And it feels nuts to have to order an Australian ink from the UK!

 

[mizgeorge]

I've dithered about this one twice now - I'm sure I'll get it eventually, but I'm not convinced I want to pay pretty much full price for it. The Brown looks nice as well - and I have ordered the blue one.

 

For salmon, how about Van Dieman's Tassie Salmon? It's quite pink, but I rather like it.