Resistance of document inks and ballpoints to household chemicals – a surprise!

[hinnerk]

Recently while cooking some ballpoint ink was smearing on contact with something that might have been either water or Pernod. I think that any ink used while cooking should stay unchanged so I collected some likely candidates in order to test inky for resistance against common household chemicals.

 

I chose four chemical cocktails: denatured alcohol, Octopus printer nozzle cleaning liquid, household bleach and water. The liquids came directly from the bottle and were undiluted. Each test consisted of at least 2h of submerged soaking each. The paper is Rhodia Le R 90 g/m².

 

Results:

 

To my surprise the ballpoints inks suffered worse than the document inks. The BIC Chrystal washed away completely with denatured alcohol. The Schmidt and the Online ballpoint inks performed surprisingly bad in all four liquids. Of the five different ballpoint inks only two were still easily legible in all cases, the Fisher Space Pen and the Uni Jetstream.

 

The D.A. Document Brown and Noodler's Rome performed very well. In the past I have tested quite a few more document inks with water and household bleach. Based on that experience and this test I do now believe that modern fountain pen document inks will often outperform ballpoint inks.

 

All the pigmented drawing fine-liners performed flawlessly.

 

Here are the details:

 

• De Atramentis Document Brown:
  • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: No change
  • Bleach: Discoloration
  • H2O: No change
• UNI PIN pigment fineliner:
  • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: No change
  • Bleach: No change
  • H2O: No change
• Schmidt Easyflow 9000, ISO-12757-1:
  • Alcohol: Strong discoloration
  • Cleaner: Strong discoloration
  • Bleach: Strong discoloration
  • H2O: Bleeding
• BIC Christal:
  • Alcohol: GONE!
  • Cleaner: Discoloration
  • Bleach: Light Discoloration
  • H2O: No change
• Fisher Space Pen:
  • Alcohol: Light Discoloration
  • Cleaner: Light Discoloration
  • Bleach: Discoloration
  • H2O: Bleeding
• Online Gasdruckmine (rebranded Schmidt P950?):
  • Alcohol: Discoloration
  • Cleaner: Strong Discoloration
  • Bleach: Discoloration
  • H2O: Light Bleeding
• UNI Jetstream:
  • Alcohol: Light Bleeding
  • Cleaner: Light Discoloration
  • Bleach: Light Discoloration
  • H2O: Bleeding
• Pentel Brush Pen SES-P15 (pigment) :
  • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: No change
  • Bleach: No change
  • H2O: No change
• Faber-Castell PITT (pigment), color 175:
  • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: No change
  • Bleach: No change
  • H2O: No change
• Edding 1800 (pigment):
• • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: No change
  • Bleach: No change
  • H2O: No change
• Noodler's Rome (Burning), supposed to change color from brown to purple when wet:
  • Alcohol: No change
  • Cleaner: Purple
  • Bleach: Purple, light discoloration
  • H2O: Purple

 

 

 

[LizEF]

Thanks for your efforts and sharing the results!  This doesn't surprise me.  I had long-term experience with ballpoints at one workplace, and they would fade under fluorescent light, so I never expected ballpoints to necessarily be good document inks.

[hinnerk]

Actually, I bought the Schmidt and the Online pens because they were advertised to me as “dokumentenecht,” which means permanent, archival, and chemically resistant according to specific ISO standards. This is somewhat relevant due to compliance rules here, but mainly, I was just curious.

 

However, I found out that while these ballpoints meet ISO-12757-1, the specific standard for “dokumentenecht” is actually ISO-12757-2, which these ballpoints do not comply with.

 

So, through this experiment, I learned that I need to do more Googling before buying ballpoint pens. Honestly, I have very little experience with ballpoints—I own way more bottled document fountain pen inks than ballpoints. 😆

[LizEF]

2 minutes ago, hinnerk said:

I need to do more Googling before buying ballpoint pens.

Yes, keep googling until you're convinced never to buy a ballpoint pen!

[hinnerk]

1 minute ago, LizEF said:

Yes, keep googling until you're convinced never to buy a ballpoint pen!

 

Na, I'll just procrastinate the googling and play with fountain pens instead. 😛

[LizEF]

14 minutes ago, hinnerk said:

Na, I'll just procrastinate the googling and play with fountain pens instead. 😛

[TSherbs]

I love these kinds of comparative tests. Thank you for taking the time to organize it, perform it, photograph it, and post it here. 

[amberleadavis]

Thank you for all the effort.  These tests are inspirational and educational.