Mystery ink review

Hi everyone, welcome to day 8 of my Inkmas calendar!

Today I drew out of the bag an ink sample labeled Colorverse’s Sea Europa. I was pretty psyched because I’ve never had the chance to use a colorverse ink, and I knew Sea Europa had a rusty red color that I’ve wanted to try.

But....I don’t think this is Sea Europa. This ink is just....not a red color. At first I thought it was because of the low flow I was getting in my one pen, so I swapped to another. Then I thought maybe because these are plant based inks they’ll take a little bit to dry and develop their color. But nothing changed from this brownish color so....I’m positive this isn’t Sea Europa. If you’d like to see a review with some swabs of actual Sea Europa, here’s a link to Mountain of Ink ‘s blog post about it. 

Well, no matter. I’ll review the mystery ink! 

Writing 

This ink goes down pretty dry. I had it in my TWSBI GO and then in my Lamy AL Star (both medium nibs) and I found it to be a low flowing dry ink.

I imagine if you lean towards fine Japanese nibs you’ll be getting a lot of feedback from the paper as you write 

Dry time

Since this ink went down pretty dry, I was expecting around 15 seconds for dry time and it turns out that was a pretty good guess- it was mostly dry in 15 seconds and totally dry in 20 seconds 

Color

This ink goes down as a pretty even brown- I didn’t notice any shading or color difference as I was writing, or any difference between the two pens I had it inked up in.

I’d describe it in the chocolatey brown family. 

It’s a nice brown, but I’m not a huge fan of brown colors in my pens personally. 

Verdict

Well, whatever this ink was it’s cool! A bit on the dry side but overall not a bad writer. I bought these ink samples from Goulet, and this is just an accidental mislabeling. I suspect it’s actually still a Colorverse ink, it might actually be Hubble Zoom or Space Laika- due to computer display differences it’s a little hard to compare my ink sample apples to apples with the other colors.

Oh well, this was actually pretty fun not knowing what ink it was! Maybe I’ll start doing blind reviews of ink

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow for day 9! Happy writing!