Ink Review: NEW Diamine Starlit Sea Shimmer ink 2018

**Chrissy** · September 17th, 2018, 06:35 AM

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

Diamine Starlit Sea Shimmer ink is a new addition to the Diamine Shimmer inks range for 2018.
It’s a mid to dark blue ink with silver shimmer. I couldn’t find inks that were exactly this shade in my collection, and I have a lot of blue inks!
It doesn’t lean at all red, but it doesn’t lean much green either. So it’s a mid range blue. I got out loads of blue inks, for comparison purposes, and couldn’t find one that was a reasonably close match!
It didn’t suffer from any hard starts or skips 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 wetter, and looked darker in the Waterman Phileas pen with stub 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: Excellent. Felt wetter in broader nibs.
Lubrication: Excellent.
Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
Start-up: Immediate.
Saturation: Quite saturated ink, and a strong colour.
Shading Potential: Very nice 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.