This is another ink a lovely stationery friend sent me a sample of, and I don’t remember who sent the ink. Lesson learned. All new samples are getting labeled.

This ink is similar to Oster’s other sheening inks- highly saturated, loads of sheen, lots of color. It’s well lubricated and has a great flow- so long as you continue to write, but lay that pen down for more than a few seconds and it slows to a stop and needs some coaxing to flow again. The ink is also well behaved on almost all of the paper I’ve tested it on- including the garbage paper at work. On cheap paper it doesn’t feather but it does have some bleed and show through. Like other inks with sheen that excess ink can transfer to the opposite page of a notebook.

Dry time is better than expected for an ink this saturated. It was less than 7 seconds on good paper and less than 5 on cheap paper, and on garbage paper it was dry in 3 seconds. Like many darker saturated inks, this one also photocopies very well.

In my spill and wipe test the ink tended to blur the moment the water touched the page and smeared even more as I wiped the ink away. In the drip test the color spread and lifted and soaked around the test area. The lines were blurry and barely legible. I would not expect this ink to survive a trip through the washer.

The color of this ink is a greenish blue. I wouldn’t call it teal but it leans closer to that than it does to purple. It is pretty professional. I have come to really like the Robert Oster inks. Like many saturated inks they seem to have some flow issues if you leave a pen uncapped, but overall seem to behave well even on the worst of paper.