Review/Preview: Jacques Herbin 1798 Amethyst de l’Oural Ink

J. Herbin unveiled its latest specialty ink and I crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn this morning to do a special preview/review of the new sparkly jewel. This new ink is not a 1670 ink, its a 1798 and its no longer just J. Herbin branded, its under Jacques Herbin. The color is the long-awaited purple: Amethyst de l’Oural!

And, as if they knew we’d turn the bottle over to see the sparkle, there is an embossed ship and branding logo on the bottom of the bottle too. I was trying to capture the sparkles at the bottom, they are silver this time and you can see them a bit at the top of the bottle bottom. They look like dust particles.

Another note about the bottle, the opening in the bottle is larger making it easier to get your pens into it. It’s also a little bit bigger overall but the volume is the same. The box is also grey instead of white.

With the help of some early morning sun, you can see the sparkles in the ink swatch and you can also see that dear ol’ Jacques is the one ink that doesn’t always get along so well with the Col-o-ring paper and my dip nibs. I got a little feathering towards the bottom there. Grrr!

With the flick of the wrist, I did capture a bit of the sparkle in the sunlight though. Oooooooo!

I tried to catch some of the sparkle in a quick sketch of the bottle, Its more evident in person, of course.

In my writing sample, on Tomoe River paper, using a Lamy Safari and a 1.1mm nib, the ink flowed well. I did need to continually agitate the pen to keep the metallic flakes appearing. The ink dried pretty quickly considering it was Tomoe River paper, metallic flake ink and a 1.1mm nib but I still managed to stick my hand in it a couple times.

As always, I do recommend that sparkle inks are not for the faint of heart, vintage pens or pens that are difficult to disassemble to clean as it is sometimes challenging to get all the metallic flakes out of the feed fins if you cannot fully disassemble the pen for cleaning.

Also, the wider the nib, the more you’ll be able to see the metallic flake. So plan accordingly when choosing a pen for this ink.

As with most metallic inks, there’s not a lot of shading with Amethyst de l’Oural. The metallic flake more than makes up for the loss of shading, right? Compared to the DeAtramentis Brilliant Violet Silver, Amethyst de l’Oural is a bit more understated.

We were all waiting for a purple ink in the 1670/1798 line and its finally here. Is it what we were waiting for? I wish the metallic flakes didn’t sink quite so quickly… damn you, gravity!

Jacques Herbin 1798 Amethyst de l’Oural is available for pre-order today at all your favorite pen shops and will start shipping in September.


DISCLAIMER: This item was for review free of charge by Exaclair USA. Please see the About page for more details.

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