Diamine Inkvent 2023: Day After
Inkvent has come to an end!
Hello everyone! Inkvent 2023 is officially behind us! If you’re still here, that’s awesome! Welcome back! I’ve had a lot of time (two months since I began working on the reviews) to reflect and form opinions on the calendar as a whole, and I thought I’d take some time to talk about it.
I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room: there were a lot of shimmering inks in this year’s calendar. Let’s look at some numbers.
Out of 25 Inks we’ve had:
16/25 Inks with particulates
9/16 of those were Diamine’s “Chameleon” inks
6/16 of them were standard shimmering inks
1/16 was a new “Star-bright” ink.
64% of the calendar was shimmering inks. What remains is 9 non-shimmering inks — two of which are scented. Now, I’m not one to dislike shimmering inks, but even I think it’s excessive, especially when most of them are in Diamine’s “Chameleon” category, which I don’t particularly care for. I don’t think the chameleon inks work all that well compared to standard shimmers, and I would have gladly dropped a few of them in favor of a few sheening inks (which we got none of this year). I can easily see where this would be a point of contention for many individuals who participated in Inkvent this year.
With that out of the way, I want to talk about my opinions on 2023’s calendar as a whole.
So, how was it?
I enjoyed it! I’m considerably more pleased with this year’s calendar than last year’s green edition (which I was unfortunately unable to review at the time). With the green edition, I had a strong feeling that perhaps Diamine was running out of ideas to maintain thematic relevance with their calendar. I can only imagine how difficult it is to think of 25 unique and seasonally-appropriate Inkvent inks each year. I can hardly blame them. While not all of them were winners in that context (or at the very least, I was unable to discern their relevance), many of them were, and some of them were especially creative and distinctive in their approach.
As far as the inks themselves go, many of them were great. I can comfortably say that at least 16 out of 25 of them I would consider for full-sized bottles in the future. I loved a majority of the standard inks this year! Early Dusk in particular caught me off guard. What I initially expected to be a fairly basic blue has won me over and found its way into a Custom 74 that I've been using with my daily planner. Thus far, I’ve burned through 2 and a half cartridges of it. My little Inkvent bottle will not last. I’m sure I’ll quickly burn through the other standards like Cashmere Rose and Fireside Snug, as well.
Plenty of the shimmering inks were great too! Both Merry & Bright and Sugar Snap were standouts for me. I even wrote my holiday cards with Merry & Bright this year! Other shimmers like Masquerade and Bah Humbug were also very appealing to me. An interesting addition to the calendar was (what I’m fairly certain is) Diamine’s first “Star Bright” Ink, Glacier. It’s exactly what it sounds like: an ink with a bright and brilliant, highly reflective shimmer. I had a ton of fun with Glacier. I was so afraid that it was going to clog my pen or be an absolute mess to clean, and it really wasn’t. It was great. I’m excited to see what Diamine does with Star Bright inks in the future. Will they all have silver particulates? I can’t wait to find out.
What was bad?
Unfortunately, I have to say that despite liking many of the colors available — including the shimmers — I was also struck by fatigue with how many shimmers there were this year. Since I was reviewing them, I didn’t exactly have the same experience as most others who participated in Inkvent and opened them daily throughout December. In preparation for these reviews, I was swatching and sampling several of the inks a day, and let me tell you: cleaning 5 inks out of a pen in one day when 4 of them are shimmers is not fun. As I mentioned earlier, a majority of the shimmering inks were Diamine’s chameleon inks, and while many of them were beautiful, the chameleon effect in general was difficult to observe. Sure, you can see the effect to a degree if you move the paper around and look at it from different angles, but a lot of the time it has to be some pretty awkward angles. Nearly every one of the chameleon inks also left a light film inside the pen that had to be scrubbed out after disassembly. Thankfully, that’s easy enough to do with my Diamond 580 test pens, but imagine something that isn’t easy to disassemble. That would really suck. Many of the chameleon inks are still visually beautiful though, and in the end, it’s not enough of an issue to stop me from inking up certain pens with them, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Nightfall, Astral, and Raise a Glass compared
Another thing that bothered me was the few inks in the calendar that felt like repeats. Glacier and Blizzard are both great frosty blues, and side by side one of them is obviously darker than the other, but I don’t think they’re distinct enough to justify including both. Seeing as Glacier is the only Star Bright ink, that’s the one that gets my vote. Then there’s Nightfall, Astral, and Raise a Glass. The three of these are exceptionally dark inks with Diamine’s chameleon shimmer. The colors are certainly different (blue, black, purple) but they’re so dark that at a glance it’s difficult to tell, and as a whole, I don’t think the differences are substantial enough to warrant including all 3. Any of these inks on their own are fine additions to Inkvent, but I can’t help but feel that they’re too similar to be grouped together in the same calendar.
So, that leaves us with the truly bad. The literal stinkers. The scented inks.
Why, Diamine?
Sweet Dreams and Cinnabun. Despite a few compliments to the colors themselves, I didn’t see many positive opinions about either of these. I’m not surprised in the slightest. They were awful. The scented inks are watery, and the immediate observation is that it makes them horribly feathery, but it goes so far beyond that. Because they’re so watery, they’re no longer slick. There’s no lubrication, and they don’t feel great to write with. The inks also end up looking so washed out. There’s no dimension or substance. They end up looking flat and sad. I can’t say for certain what it is about Diamine’s scented inks that cause them to be so feathery and watery, but I’m fairly sure that if it wasn’t for the scents, they’d be on the Yay list. I’m still upset that such an innocent confectionery delight as the cinnabun had to be the victim of these atrocities, and I hope I never see scented inks in a calendar again.
So what now?
Well, nothing! Inkvent is over! But I hope it comes back next year. I don’t know how long Diamine plans to continue their Inkvent calendars, but hopefully they can squeeze out at least one more. Good inks or bad inks, the calendar is still a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to whatever Diamine brings us in the coming year.