Ink Review: NEW Diamine Mystique Shimmer ink 2018

**Chrissy** · September 17th, 2018, 06:02 AM

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

Diamine Mystique Shimmer ink is a new addition to the Diamine Shimmer inks range for 2018. It is a saturated “blurple” dark purplish-blue ink with gold shimmer. At first it looked similar to Arabian Nights (silver shimmer), but it’s more purple than that ink. It also easily shows up it’s gold shimmer.

It’s not as dark as Eclipse and leans more purple than blue, but I would still call it a “blurple.”
It has beautiful shading as well as gold shimmer. This one dried quite quickly, as is usual for inks in this colour range, but it didn’t feel dry to write with.
It 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, but there was no problem seeing the gold shimmer even with the F nib.
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 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 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: Good 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.