Ink Review: NEW Diamine Dragon Blood Shimmer ink 2018

**Chrissy** · September 17th, 2018, 05:27 AM

Today I'm reviewing a brand new Diamine Shimmer ink for 2018: Diamine Dragon Blood Shimmer ink.

Diamine Dragon Blood Shimmer ink is a new addition to the Diamine Shimmer inks range for 2018.
It is a fairly saturated, darkish, blood-red ink with gold shimmer.

Dragon Blood is a slightly browner leaning red than several other reds I compared it against and it easily shows up it’s gold shimmer.
It’s not as dark as Oxblood, but is darker than many of the other popular Diamine red inks. Exactly what you might imagine for Dragon Blood; neither too brown nor too pink.

It has very nice shading as well as gold shimmer. It was a nicely wet ink to write with and didn’t suffer from any hard starts or non-starts when I put the uncapped pen down to do swab tests, dry times and water resistance.

In fact it never suffered from hard starts despite this ink fill having been in this pen for over a month. I’ve deliberately left it for days in order to see if it suffers from hard starting or any skipping when I uncap the pen and start writing again. It has never failed to start writing immediately.

It dried fairly quickly on all of the papers I used it on and once dry it didn’t smudge or smear.

I found it flowed much wetter, and looked darker in the Lamy Safari pen with B nib that I used.

It easily washes off of my hands with cold or warm water and bar soap and it easily flushes out of my converters and pens just using water. I have inked up a Lamy Al-Star and a Pilot Custom 74 Demo with these shimmer inks so that I can clearly see when there are shimmer particles inside the section and when there aren’t. Cleaning them out of both of these sections was easy.

I’m finding that Diamine Shimmer inks are wetter than they used to be and that makes them easier to use in many fountain pen brands.

Flow Rate: Very good. Felt wetter in broader nibs.
Lubrication: Very good.
Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
Start-up: Immediate.
Saturation: Saturated ink.
Shading Potential: Plenty of shading.
Show-Through / Bleed-Through: Hardly any but just a little on the following:
- Hobonichi Techo (TR paper)
- Tomoe River 52gsm.
Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Not seen.
Nib Creep / “Crud”: Not seen.
Staining (pen): Not seen after several days in the pen - easy clean-up with water.
Staining (hands): Easy clean-up with bar soap and warm water.
Clogging: Not seen. Seems unlikely.
Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof but has some water resistance.
Availability: Available in decorative 50ml glass bottles exclusive to the Diamine Shimmer ink range. Sold directly through the Diamine web-site, or via many retail outlets worldwide.