Ever since we got the word last year that Sailor was discontinuing it's current Jentle line of inks, and, somewhat oddly, replacing them with new versions of inks previously issued as "limited editions", I've been mourning the discontinuation of Apricot, Sailor's orange ink. I understand that this is utterly nonsensical. I'm hoarding two or three bottles of the stuff, and since I've only finished one or two bottles of ink in the five years I've been in this hobby, this probably qualifies as a 10-year supply, if not more. (Some people may use orange ink on a daily basis. I don't.) Despite this, over the past year I've been searching for a suitable alternative to my Apricot, should I ever run out.
If you look carefully, in the background, you can see my newest ink obsession.
Enter the first pretender. Iroshizuku Yu-Yake is a perfectly good ink. It doesn't feather on my cheap office paper, it flows well, and it has a nice pure orange color that shades decently. So what's the problem with it? I'll show you:
This isn't a 100% accurate color reproduction, but it's close (Orange Inks are hard to photograph/scan.) In this picture, the Yu-yake shows up a tad light, and the Apricot a shade darker, but the difference in vibrancy is accurate.
Yu-yake certainly doesn't have the same "pop" as the Apricot, and to be fair, Pilot probably intended Yu-Yake to be a completely different color. It's also somewhat unfair that I chose to show off the Apricot in a 1911 with a Nagahara-tuned music nib, but Apricot looks just as good in a fine nib. Iroshizuku does win out on the cheap office paper that I have to use on a daily basis at work, so I will probably keep this bottle around. Apricot tends to bleed through.
The hunt for a suitable Apricot replacement continues. But then again, what else do I have to do with my time and money?