Pigment Black ink that is pigment only, no dyes?

[amper]

This is probably a futile quest, but I figured I'd ask, anyway. Is anyone aware of a pigment black fountain pen ink (that is, with no binders) that does not contain any dyes, whose color comes solely from carbon black pigment? 

[arcfide]

I don't know for sure, mostly because I don't know how you would differentiate one from another? How would you test this?

[JulieParadise]

2 hours ago, arcfide said:

I don't know for sure, mostly because I don't know how you would differentiate one from another? How would you test this?

 

The "no binder"-part would be very tricky, I guess, because you need something to bind the pigment particles to paper, because otherwise they will just fall off like many shimmer particles in glitter inks do when there are too many ...

 

One would test this with a bit of water, just like any other test to see what parts or whether all of an ink is water soluble. The pigment should stay where it is, but the dye component probably dissolves again and gets washed away, leaving a tinted cloud or puddle or gets lifted off with the brush completely.

[BrassRatt]

One might suppose that a dye component would show up by smearing or washing away with water (after the line is dry) whereas the pigment component would not.  This might give a test.  

 

But this seems by no means certain.  Cellulose-reactive dye would not wash away unless the writing was too wet for all the dye to react, and some pigment might migrate in the absence of "binder".  

 

I'd be very curious to hear if anyone has tested these ideas. 

 

[BrassRatt]

On the matter of "binder" -- of the several brands of pigment ink for fountain pens, do we know that they do not contain a binder of some sort?  Or do their pigment particles just fall off paper? 

 

What would serve as binder that would not be detrimental to fountain pen use, in the way the shellac or gum binders make drawing inks unsuitable for fountain pens? 

 

[Mercian]

13 hours ago, amper said:

This is probably a futile quest, but I figured I'd ask, anyway. Is anyone aware of a pigment black fountain pen ink (that is, with no binders) that does not contain any dyes, whose color comes solely from carbon black pigment? 

My own uninformed guess would be:

Sailor Kiwa Guro;

Platinum Carbon Black;

Pelikan ‘Fount India’.

 

I have no idea what is in the inks apart from particles of carbon and biocides (and water to act as a solvent, and maybe some kind of lubricant?), but I don't think that any of them contains any dyestuffs.

I don’t have any Fount India (have read that it’s ‘high-maintenance’ and smeary) or PCB, but I do have Kiwa Guro.
Words written with it have a graphite-like silvery sheen when viewed from certain angles.

See e.g. this review.

👍

[Horseflesh]

What is the actual property of the ink you are trying to find? You're asking about how it's made, but I assume that how it performs is really what's important. 

 

If it's being colorfast or whatever, I am sure people can do tests and figure it out. If you actually need to know the detailed composition, that's going to be a lot harder to do.

 

[amper]

The reason I am asking this is because my ink of choice is a Prussian Blue pigmented ink with no dye and no binder. Because it has no dye, it doesn't stain anything, and cleans completely from plastics and metals, but on paper, it is highly water-resistant and lightfast.

As I've mentioned before, for the past 10 years, since discovering its properties here on FPN, my ink of choice has been Mrs. Stewart's Concentrated Liquid Bluing, a laundry bluing product that has been manufactured since the late 19th Century, and which is identical to historical recipes for Prussian Blue ink. It contains Prussian Blue (ferric ferrocyanide) pigment, water, a small amount of oxalic acid (which evidently helps keep the pigment suspended/dispersed in the water, and a biocidal preservative to deter microbial growth in the bottle. It's the most gorgeous midnight blue color, it's cheap, widely available, and doesn't clog pens. The only possible downside is that research by the Sheaffer pen company several decades ago claimed it can corrode gold pen nibs. Since I have no desire to sacrifice a gold nib to the pen research demons, I restrict my use of it to steel-nibbed pens, and I'm totally fine with not using gold nibs, anymore, for my daily writers.

Prussian Blue has the distinction of being the first synthetic inorganic pigment ever discovered, and it has the second-smallest pigment particle size after carbon black, which is why it doesn't clog pens. So, I was hoping to find a carbon black (or really, any other pigment) ink made similarly, without any dyes, just pigment, water, preservative, and a dispersant agent. I don't know that it would be possible to test a commercial ink to determine its composition after the fact, without access to a laboratory and the expertise to conduct such analysis, so I was hoping that someone here might have access to that information via some other means.

[amper]

15 hours ago, BrassRatt said:

What would serve as binder that would not be detrimental to fountain pen use, in the way the shellac or gum binders make drawing inks unsuitable for fountain pens? 

 

I honestly don't know. I'm not as knowledgeable about fountain pen ink chemistry as I am about paint and drawing ink chemistry. But I do know that shellac, gelatin/glue, or gum binders are definitely right out for fountain pens.

[dragondazd]

If there is a safe binder, someone please let me know so I can keep the vinta glitters on the paper lol

 

platinum carbon black is most likely imo. How can I test this for you? Smear on plastic and see if it wipes off? I have sailor kiwa guro also but it moves more with water as others here have shown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mercian]

32 minutes ago, amper said:

The reason I am asking this is because my ink of choice is a Prussian Blue pigmented ink with no dye and no binder. Because it has no dye, it doesn't stain anything, and cleans completely from plastics and metals, but on paper, it is highly water-resistant and lightfast.

It sounds to me as though you might like Noodler’s Black.

 

It’s cellulose-reactive, so it binds indelibly to paper (and to cotton, and wood). It is also lightfast, and doesn’t spread, feather, or bleed (except on really pulpy paper).
But it wipes off plastic and washes off skin easily. It is neutral pH, and washes out of pens with just plain water.

It also doesn’t stain the ‘pli-glass’ sac of an aerometric Parker “51” 😮

[dipper]

I suggest Sailor Kiwaguro may be suitable, based on the evidence of chromatography strip tests. I have no information about the ingredients used in any of the inks shown below. This suggestion is based on the chromatography results only.

 

First some example strips with dye-based black inks that are composed of a mixture of coloured dyes.

 

Secondly some black inks that smear out into a grey haze. Note the two strips having an overall blue hue, and unexplained banding in some strips.

 

And finally Sailor Kiwaguro...

The "nano" carbon particles appear to soak into the absorbent paper and then just sit there. Very little movement compared with the other strips above, and certainly no dyes separating out.

[arcfide]

I think it's very difficult to test for this. The problem is that pigments can lift off if they aren't embedded into the paper just as well as dyes can run when washed with water. Additionally, even fully pigmented inks are likely to smear if rubbed on most good paper. This was, in fact, one of the traditional reasons that people preferred iron gall inks for black ink on animal skin vellum. India Ink or Carbon ink at the time didn't have dyes in it (at least the canonical versions), and even with binders, they wouldn't fully absorb into animal skin, so they could be "erased" by mechanical action. On the other hand, the iron gall recipes would fundamentally stain the skins, which made them much more resistant to erasure. Of course, the carbon black ink was totally lightfast, whereas the iron gall was not, but at the time, this wasn't as important, at least to most people, especially considering the cost, time and trouble of using carbon inks. 

 

The inks that definitely stand out for me as ones that are worth trying would be the standard "best" carbon inks:

• Platinum Carbon Black
• Sailor Kiwaguro
• Montblanc Permanent Black
• Pelikan Font India

All of these are specifically designed to be fountain pen friendly and relatively easy to maintain. Other archival pigmented inks exist such as those from De Atramantis and the like, but I have to admit that I have more confidence overall in the set above, and I haven't tried the others. 

 

I know from reading some literature on Platinum and Sailor inks that Sailor specifically designed their ink with pen maintenance in mind. They state that they did not make the ink quite as permanent on the page (I take that to mean that they may not have used any binders) in order to make it easier to wash out of the pen. Thus, Kiwaguro can sometimes have more lift off than other carbon inks. Platinum, on the other hand, appears to have picked a specific fountain pen friendly binder (or at least it seems that way) or surfactant that helps the ink penetrate into fibers a little better, and so Platinum Carbon Black remains the gold standard of carbon inks for fountain pens. It can definitely be cleaned and rinsed out of fountain pens quite well, and I have done so in clear demonstrators without any left over residue, but I have also seen that sometimes dried ink can "stick" to some surfaces a little more than with a purely water-soluble dye. That doesn't mean it doesn't rinse off, but you may need a little mechanical action, ultra sonic, or more water pressure. I would certainly say that both Kiwaguro and Platinum Carbon Ink appear to be at least as easy or easier to clean out and maintain than many Cellulose Reactive Noodler's inks. 

 

Montblanc's Permanent Black is worth a look because they use a different type of pigment. This leads to a much more flat, matte look, and doesn't give the pencil like shine to your writing. This can make the writing look much more dark and black. It is also easy to maintain and clean. 

 

I suspect that for all of these inks, they are almost entirely pigment-based, with very little to no dyes, because they have essentially zero run-off in many cases. That doesn't mean that they won't run off, but simply that you don't see any run off in many situations, whereas I would suspect that, at the least, if you have a water soluble dye in your pigmented ink, you can maybe expect to have run off more consistently than what you would see for the above. 

 

 

 

 

[amper]

2 hours ago, dipper said:

I suggest Sailor Kiwaguro may be suitable, based on the evidence of chromatography strip tests. I have no information about the ingredients used in any of the inks shown below. This suggestion is based on the chromatography results only.

 

WOW! Thanks! That's some pretty awesome sauce, right there. I wasn't sure if blotter strips would show it, but that's pretty conclusive.

[amper]

3 hours ago, Mercian said:

It sounds to me as though you might like Noodler’s Black.

I have a big bottle of it...around here....somewhere? I haven't even used it in years. Noodler's, however, is definitely not a pigment ink. It's a cellulose-reactive dye-based ink.

[arcfide]

12 minutes ago, amper said:

 

WOW! Thanks! That's some pretty awesome sauce, right there. I wasn't sure if blotter strips would show it, but that's pretty conclusive.

 

I think you'll find that most of the document-proof pigmented black inks behave close to what you'll see from Kiwaguro except for small variations in color, flow, and how much of the pigment can be scraped off the paper. 

[Gomer]

20 hours ago, amper said:

I have a big bottle of it...around here....somewhere? I haven't even used it in years. Noodler's, however, is definitely not a pigment ink. It's a cellulose-reactive dye-based ink.

In spite of what you might have heard, Noodler's black is not dye based.  I've looked at it under a microscope and it is a clear carrier with black particles.  The cellulose-reactive dye claim is bogus.

[TSherbs]

31 minutes ago, Gomer said:

 The cellulose-reactive dye claim is bogus.

Interesting charge. Has Noodlers itself made this claim? And if they have, you are certain that it is false? 

[Gomer]

3 hours ago, TSherbs said:

Interesting charge. Has Noodlers itself made this claim? And if they have, you are certain that it is false? 

Amper made that statement and I've seen it elsewhere.  Dyes are colored at the molecular level.  They will show that color with any optical microscope.  Put a drop of Noodler's black on a paper napkin and then add a few drops of water.   You will see hardly any spread.  The pigment stays in place.  That's why it's waterproof.

 

Do the same with a dye based black like Parker black, and you will see the colors used to simulate black.

 

 

Noodler's black is nothing more than a pigmented black ink.  At 100X you can clearly see that it is a colorless carrier with black pigment.  That's fine if that's what you want.  But, it's no miracle black dye.

[arcfide]

38 minutes ago, Gomer said:

Noodler's black is nothing more than a pigmented black ink.  At 100X you can clearly see that it is a colorless carrier with black pigment.  That's fine if that's what you want.  But, it's no miracle black dye.

 

Have you done this with Pilot's Blue Black ink as well? I would be interested to know if there is any pigment in it, since they also claim to use Cellulose Reactive ink in their formulation.