As with my Six Month Review of my favorite pens from the first part of this year, I’ll take a look at some favorite inks I’ve reviewed so far. Unfortunately, I don’t do as many ink reviews as I do pen reviews (honestly, I don’t use THAT many different inks), so this may actually turn into a recap of most of the inks I’ve reviewed this year. The good thing is that those inks I choose to review actually end up being the inks I really like and use, and I’ve loaded up on ink in the first part of this year, and look forward to broadening my horizons a bit going forward.
Pilot Iroshizuku 100th Anniversary Inks Bishamonten (Red) and Hoteison (Dark Green). While I wasn’t blown away by the 100th Anniversary Iroshizuku inks as a whole - I found the overall color palette underwhelming - these two inks have both seen steady use, and caused me to pull out my other underused Iroshizuku inks and invest in several additional colors. Look forward to seeing more Iroshizuku content coming your way.
Rediscovering an Old Favorite: Private Reserve Burgundy Mist. I set aside my Private Reserve inks years ago and more or less wrote off the brand, but my recent experience with Burgundy Mist has me wanting to repurchase more old favorites as Private Reserve has been revitalized under new ownership.
Robert Oster / Pen Addict “Fire on Fire” Collaboration. Brad and Robert Oster came up with one of the best “everyday” orange inks on the market, in terms of flow, visibility, and the lack of any tendency to form “nib crud.” Fire on Fire will be a mainstay of my rotation for as long as they continue making the ink.
Taccia Ebi (Purple Red) and Uguisu (Olive Green). Taccia is a brand that I’ve grown to appreciate over the years. They don’t make a wide range of products, but what they do make - both pens and ink - are of excellent quality. The inks are also quite reasonably priced, and I’m certainly going to pick more of these up in the future.
Waterman Tender Purple. Making a guest appearance in my review of the Tactile Turn Gist 2.0, I will always think of this ink as Waterman Violet, which is what it was called for years before Waterman updated its line not to add more colors, but rather a series of cheesy names such as “Tender Purple,” “Inspired Blue,” “Serenity Blue,” etc. Strange marketing decisions aside, it’s a great ink, and I’ve had multiple fills of this ink loaded in my Gist for the past couple months.
Thanks for reading! For more of my thoughts on inks, check out my post titled “Favorite Workhorse Fountain Pen Inks, as Determined by Actual Use.” As a reminder, I’m on vacation for the rest of this week so nearly all of what I post will be recap-style content. Things will be back to normal next week!