Ink Review: Diamine Velvet Rose - Philippines Exclusive

[Chrissy]

Today I'm reviewing Diamine Velvet Rose ink. This is a Diamine Exclusive ink made specially for sale in the Philippines.

It’s a very saturated, very dark, purple/burgundy ink with heavy green sheen. It doesn’t have so much sheen as the Organics Studio very high sheen inks, that means you may need to dilute the ink before it will write properly, but has much more sheen than what you would call a “standard” ink.

It’s darker than most purple or burgundy inks that I have, and the green sheen is very noticeable on less absorbent papers.
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. I like that about Diamine high sheen inks.
It dried fairly quickly on most papers and once dry it didn’t smudge or smear. I tested for this by rubbing across my writing.
It wrote quite wet in my pens and I really enjoyed writing with it. I really like this colour.

With these high sheen inks showthrough and bleedthrough can sometimes be a problem on cheaper papers. There was a little showthrough on a couple of the papers I wrote on, although I could still have written on the reverse of all them with no problem.

The green sheen is usually more visible when using pens with wet flow and broader nibs and can be paper dependant. The pen I used on my additional papers was a Lamy AL-Star with M steel nib.

• Flow Rate: Excellent.
• Lubrication: Excellent.
• Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
• Start-up: Immediate.
• Saturation: Highly saturated ink.
• Shading Potential: Some shading seen with finer nibs or dry writing pens.
• Sheen: Plenty of green sheen.
• Show-Through/Bleedthrough: Not a problem on the papers I used.
• Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Not seen.
• Nib Creep / “Crud”: Not seen.
• Staining (pen): Not seen after cleaning - fairly easy clean-up with soapy water.
• Staining (hands): Fairly clean-up. May need two hand washes.
• Clogging: Not seen in my pens. Probably pen dependent.
• Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof and has little water resistance.
• Availability: Exclusive to the Philippines and available in 80ml glass bottles from Everything Calligraphy.

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