Ink Review #76

*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.

Overview

The color/properties:

Edelstein Golden Beryl is vibrant yellow ink with golden shimmering particulates. It shades with a soft cut between a golden yellow and a darker, near-orange tone. Wetter pens may bring out more of the orange tonality of this ink than the yellow. There are a lot of particulates in this ink and it shows, providing a very even spread of shimmer throughout the writing. You might have noticed hints of green in the swatches, You might actually notice some greens with a wet enough pen, but to me it looks like an effect of the concentrated shimmer, and not the base ink itself.

Rhodia

Leuchtturm1917

Performance on paper:

This ink is well-behaved. There was minimal bleeding on the Kokuyo paper, and no visible bleed-through or feathering on the other papers. It should perform just fine on most fountain pen-friendly papers. The dry times were mostly average, taking around 10-15 seconds to dry for most nibs, but I was surprised to see that on Rhodia in particular, almost every nib dried within 5 seconds! The water resistance was as expected: most of the color washes away, and while there may be some traces left of whatever was written, I wouldn’t expect anything to be legible after water exposure.

Midori MD

Maruman

Tomoe River

Kokuyo

Performance in the pen:

For a shimmering ink, Golden Beryl performs well. I had some heavy clogging with the fine nib that I use to write the headers on each of the test pages, but otherwise, I didn’t run into any other clogs, hard starts, or skips. The ink has a medium flow and is decently lubricated. It makes for an overall pleasant writing experience. I do want to note however that while the ink generally had a medium flow, I did find that the flow did tend to slow down considerably, and it was very noticeable as the level of lubrication and shimmer distribution would wane. Stopping for a few seconds allowed the flow to return to normal, but for longer writing sessions this can be frustrating.

As expected, the color itself was easy enough to clean out of the pen, it washed out fairly quickly with a single flush and soak of the nib units, however, the inside of the pen was left with a golden haze from the shimmer particulates that required disassembly of the pen to remove.

• Performance in a pen: 7/10

• Performance on paper: 9/10

• Color saturation: 6/10

• Sheening: 0/10

• Shading: 6/10

• Dry time: 8.5/10

• Water resistance: 1/10

• Ease of cleaning: 6.5/10

• Shimmer: Gold, Medium

My personal thoughts...

I like to think of Golden Beryl as one of the first “good” shimmering inks. That’s not to say that all shimmering inks beforehand were bad, but my experiences on the whole had been frustrating, to say the least. While it’s true that there are a lot of great shimmering ink options out there these days, and many that perform even better, including Pelikan’s own Golden Lapis, I have to say that revisiting this ink still yields a great experience. A lot of the hype has died down at this point, but there certainly was hype, and there was a good reason for it — It’s just a great ink.

And that means that it’s time to be critical of the color itself! Does it look like golden beryl? Why yes, yes it does.

More images/info:

Tools and materials used in the writing samples:

• A TWSBI Diamond 580 with 5 nib units including an EF, F, M, B, and 1.1mm stub, All nibs are tuned to perform at the same wetness.

• A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad

• A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook

• A Midori MD A5 Notebook

• A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook

• A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook

• A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook