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Review: Sailor Jentle Yama-Dori Fountain Pen Ink

I picked this ink up ages ago via a sale on Amazon. It is a favorite ink of mine, and leans too green and teal for it to be considered professional. That is to say, that I don’t think that I can get away with signing paperwork with this lovely ink. That said, I think it deserves to be reviewed.

I’ve used this in most of my pens over the years. It works well in most pens and better yet cleans out of them with ease. It does not seem to stain any of my demonstrators. It is nice in a fine to broad nib. It wetter flowing nibs the ink looks dark blue-green and has a red sheen. In even the finest nib I found it to give a smooth feel, it is nicely lubricating.

It is generally a well behaved ink, working well on nice paper and decently on junky paper. On garbage paper it is not prone to feathering or bleeding. On nice paper you get a lovely red sheen. Dry time on better paper is slower, around 7 seconds with a fine nib. On garbage paper it dries in under 5.

This ink isn’t going to survive the wash. In my wipe test it smeared all over. The drip test left blue ink migrated with little semblance of the lines left.

The ink performed well on most paper. That said it didn’t do well on Field Notes*. I had plenty of bleed and show through in that book. It did really well in a standard Story Supply Co book. Of course it does great in my Baron Fig Confidant and L1917. Clearly i like this ink. I purchased a full bottle. This ink is readily available from most vendors who carry Sailor inks. You can find many other reviews of this ink on most review blogs. It’s a  great ink.

Review Sailor Jentle Sky High Fountain Pen Ink

Sailor Jentle Sky High is a bright cheerful blue ink that is available in 50ml bottles for roughly $25.* the Jentle bottles have a reservoir in them to assist in filling your pen. The reservoir works really well at assisting to get every last drop of ink out of a bottle. I find the short squat bottles to be easy to use and look nice on my shelf.

I filled my Hero 616 large sized with a fine nib with this ink. My goal here is to find professional inks for work I’m limiting myself to extra fine, fine, and medium nibs. I have no doubt this ink would look fabulous in a fat broad nib. It looks great in my EF and F nibs thus far. The ink is bright cheerful blue that reminds me a lot of Pilot G2 blue or Pentel EnerGel blue. It pops off the page. The ink does tend to have a bit of a red sheen on better paper. I did not notice any shading. This is a saturated ink. Dry time is a bit slower than other inks- even on lesser paper dry time is over 7 seconds. Dry time on Field Notes** was almost instantaneous as it absorbed the ink as if I were writing onto blotter paper.

This ink is well lubricated making even a scratchy pen feel smoother. This ink feels great and looks great on all the paper I tested it on (except Field Notes.) It looks really nice on L1917, Baron Fig Confidant, Staples Stickies, and the garbage paper at work. It performed well on these too. The big stand out for lack of performance was Field Notes. The paper sucked the ink up like blotter paper and spread the line width out to ugly wide. There was plenty of show through and a touch of bleed through on the Field Notes paper. Though this was not apparent anywhere else I used the ink.

In the drip and wipe tests this ink proved to be not at all water resistant. The drips merged the ink with the paper in a large blob. Lines were not legible afterward. In the wipe test the ink lifted and smeared, leaving behind a legible line. It won’t survive the wash but it might survive a spill.

Overall I really like this ink. It is the bluest of blues. It is bright enough to pop off the page, so it could be used for editing. Is it professional? Yes. Or I think so. It is likely that this color would have given my old boss a coronary. In her mind the only professional color is black. This would have jammed her brain. To me it is in the same family as the Pilot G2 or Pentel Energel blue color- bright true royal blue.