The Well-Appointed Desk

Review by Jessica Coles

I don’t know about any of our readers out there, but I can’t resist picking up a sample of new Robert Oster inks when I see them. Like the new Robert Oster Avocado ($17 for a 50mL bottle).

All new inks are fairly thrilling in the pen world, especially so to those who grew up when the best you could hope for with color was the pen that had the four ink colors — I’m sure you remember.  The one where you would inevitably try to push all four down at the same time and get all of the refills stuck.  Red, Green, Blue, and Black.

Now the world seems to have no end in sight to the number of fountain pen ink colors that will come out.  I love trying the new colors, but Robert Oster inks seem to be on an entirely different level.  Some Oster inks sheen, others shade deeply, all of his inks are extraordinary.  Each new ink holds its own surprise.

When I saw a couple new inks when placing an order from Vanness Pens, I threw them in the shopping cart before checking out.  Avocado and Smokescreen are their names — I’ll post the review on the Smokescreen a little later.

I wanted to get this information out as soon as possible, though.  Because this ink has even more strange quirks.

What a wonderful ink!  The shading is there, even while writing in cursive.  Sometimes cursive keeps the ink flowing along the page rather than letting it settle to form darker pools.

Avocados are not a single color.  The unripe fruits are a light, dusty green, the ripe fruit a deeper green with tones of brown.  The inner flesh is a spring green while the edge of a halved avocado is a dark ring.

Robert Oster Avocado ink does the same.  In writing, the ink looks like the dusty light green of an unripe avocado.  As the ink shades, the darker areas are the color of a more mature fruit.  The pooled ink in a heavy swab is the color of a ripe avocado and includes a dark halo that appears to sheen a very dark green or black.  The pooled ink also shows a strange phenomenon.  The yellowish brown appears in the dried ink but appears a lighter color than the unpooled ink.  Lighter where the coverage is heavier? I have never seen this before in an ink.

The chromotography of Avocado shows distinct bands of color — a dusty pink, magenta, a very light yellow to bright yellow and a thin band of cyan at the very top.  The original band of ink is nowhere to be seen, indicating that the ink is absolutely not water resistant.

I highly recommend this new color.  Maybe we will even have a new term for inks that show an entirely different color when laid down heavily!  At least the ones that don’t really sheen.  Morphing inks? Lighter shade inks? This is the best thing that could happen with a new ink — a whole new category!

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were paid for by myself purchased from Vanness Pen Shop for the purpose of review.

Jacques Herbin 1798 Cornaline d’Égypte (MSRP $28) is the second color in the 1798 ink line and the sixth (!?) in the J. Herbin specialty line of metallic-ish (I say “-ish” because I don’t know how to explain Rouge Hematite) fountain pen inks. The ink was officially released this week so it should be available from your favorite retailer (check the sidebar for all our favorite retailers that stock J. Herbin).

The packaging for Cornaline d’Égypte is just as deluxe as the previous releases and features the same wider opening as the Emeraude de Chivor last year which means a pen nib will actually fit into the bottle.

I don’t know what it is with me and ink names but I managed to get the name of the ink wrong when I was writing out the header on the page! I kept trying to tell myself “It’s not called Coraline, it’s not called Coraline.” So, I wrote Corinne instead of Cornaline which sounds like the Iowa State Fair Corn Princess to me. The color is sort of reminiscent of a sunflower too so its not far off. Anyway, leave it to me to mess up the spelling of an ink name and not notice it until I am uploading it to the blog. Sorry, folks. I sometimes letter nicely but I don’t always spell well.

In writing, the particles of glitter are not nearly as apparent but the deep, burnt orange color is legible and has a good deal of shading. I stopped and agitated my pen several times in hopes of getting more glitter to show in the writing but it didn’t seem to improve the outcome.

In a wider nib or with heavy application, the color starts to look more reddish. With lighter application, the color is a bit more of a yellow orange but not a clear, clean yellow orange. It’s still got a slightly ruddy undertone.

I tried to get some close-up shots of the ink to show it catching the light. The 1798 inks contain silver metallic flakes instead of gold. The particles in Cornaline d’Egypte are very tiny which helps the overall ink flow but they still sink to the bottom of the bottle or the pen quickly. There is some evidence of the glitter flakes in the close-ups, but not much.

I don’t have a lot of other metallic inks to compare Cornaline d’Egypte to but Pen BBS #218 ($16 for 60ml bottle) and Diamine Shimmer Brandy Dazzle ($20 for a 50ml bottle) were the closest ink colors I had and both had gold sparkles, not silver.

I took some close-up images of both Brandy Dazzle and PenBBS #218 as well, even though the flecks are gold rather than silver. Both seem to have more apparent light reflecting particles and the gold does seem to match the orange hue better than silver.

In the fine, small writing, PenBBS #218 had the most metallic reflection of all three inks. So, if that’s a feature you are looking for I’d hold out for a bottle of PenBBS over the Cornaline d’Egypte. If you are an ink completionist, then you’ll probably want a bottle of Cornaline anyway, just to have to whole set. Thankfully, Herbin only releases one color per year so its not a huge investment each year.

Tools:

• Paper: Rhodia Uni-Blank No. 16 with 6mm guide sheet
• Pens: Jinhao Shark Pen, Midori bullet pencil modified dip nib holder with Zebra G titanium nib ($33.50 per 10-pack), Acrylic dip nib pen (Approx. $15), Shawn Newton Esterbrook Nib Holder with #9556 nib
• Swatches: Col-o-Ring Ink Testing Book ($10) & Col-o-dex Rotary Cards ($15)
• Brush: Blick Synthetic Round #0
• Ink:  Robert Oster Australian Opal Mauve ($17 for 50ml bottle)

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by Exaclair/QuoVadis for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.