Ink Review #90

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

Overview

The color/properties:

Wearingeul Alice is a soft pastel blue with golden shimmering particulates. It shades with a crisp cut into a much darker blue, mostly when writing in print, and you’ll notice much less shading if writing in cursive. The shimmer is light regardless of nib size, but it’s still visible and it’s mostly consistent while writing. There wasn’t a lot of variation in the amount of shimmer coming out of the pen while writing.

Rhodia

Leuchtturm1917

Performance on paper:

Wearingeul Alice shouldn’t be a problem for most papers. There was only minor bleeding on the Kokuyo sheet, but it was mostly limited to the flex nib (and I expected that damage to be much worse). The other papers didn’t show any feathering or bleeding, and overall I would call this a pretty gentle ink. The dry times are okay, but I expected a little better for a drier ink. Still, they mostly dried within 10-15 seconds (not including the flex nib), which is slightly above average. There’s not a lot of water resistance, but it was better than expected. Most of the color washes away as soon as it’s exposed to water, but it leaves perfectly legible grey shadows behind of anything that might have been written.

Midori MD

Maruman

Tomoe River

Kokuyo

Performance in the pen:

Wearingeul Alice has a dry flow and is low on lubrication. It’s not the worst — for me, it was tolerable — but if you don’t like dry-feeling inks, this ink isn’t going to cut it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get this ink to work with the extra fine nib, but the nibs that did function never had any hard starts, skips, or stops while writing. I didn’t experience any clogs due to the shimmer, but the flow did have difficulties keeping up during extended writing, and there were times when I would have to wait for the flow to catch up so I could continue writing. This ink probably won’t work in every pen and if you plan on using this ink, I would plan accordingly to use it in a pen with a higher flow (that would probably alleviate some of the dryness, too).

Cleaning the color out of the pen only required a basic soak and flush; however, the inside of the barrel was left with a heavy coating of shimmer that I couldn’t remove with just flushing, and the pen had to be disassembled so I could scrub the shimmer out.

• Performance in a pen: 5.5/10

• Performance on paper: 9/10

• Color saturation: 4/10

• Sheening: 0/10

• Shading: 5/10

• Dry time: 7.5/10

• Water resistance: 3/10

• Ease of cleaning: 5/10

• Shimmer: Light, Golden

Our thoughts...

The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland collection by Wearingeul continues to impress me, both in the quality of the inks and the consistency of theme. Objectively speaking, Alice isn’t a perfect ink: it writes a bit dry and there are notable flow issues with the shimmer. But in every other sense, it did what it should do: it turned an iconic character into a color and an ink. The light blue is an obvious color choice, perfectly reminiscent of Alice’s blue dress. What the golden shimmer might represent is anyone’s guess. The marketing copy that I found for the ink vaguely suggests that the sky blue and golden shimmer “shows the lively character of Alice.” Personally, the first thing that came to mind was Lewis Carroll’s poem, “All in the golden afternoon,” a preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which Carroll describes the occasion during which he improvised the story of Alice to entertain a trio of sisters. Disney later adapted the title into a song for their animated film in 1951. Regardless, the golden shimmer adds some whimsy to the ink, giving it a fantastical and magical look that drives the theme home. I do wish it flowed better, however.

The color is pale, but it succeeds where Wendy Darling (from the Peter and Wendy collection) failed: it’s actually visible.
I still wouldn’t call it an everyday ink, but Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was anything but an everyday story. 🐇⏱️🎩🫖☕️🌹♥️♠️♦️♣️

More images/info:

Other inks in this set:

Tools and materials used in the writing samples:

• A TWSBI Diamond 580 with 5 nib units including a F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and a Fountain Pen Revolution #5.5 ultraflex nib. 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 52gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook

• A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook

• A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook