Diamine Ink Company

Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering Fountain Pen Ink Review

Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering Fountain Pen Ink is one of the new shades of Diamine Shimmering fountain pen ink. Red Lustre is a deep dark bold red color, that will dry with gold flecks and a sparkle in the ink. Diamine Ink company has produced 22 shimmering/sparkling inks with either a gold or silver fleck and sparkle. The deep dark red with gold specks makes this a fantastic shimmering ink that really stands out. Shimmering inks may not be for everyone, but they have been tremendously popular for fountain pen enthusiasts with both Diamine Shimmering Inks and J. Herbin 1670 inks being the main players in sparkling inks.

Diamine Ink in general is known for being a high quality, affordable, UK manufactured ink that comes in a wide variety of colors. Diamine Shimmering inks have those same characteristics.

Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering Ink

Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering Ink

Please note some of these characteristics outlined below used with our testing of this Diamine ink:

Testing Factors

We used a J. Herbin Spiral Glass dip pen for this ink review, with Rhodia Block N. 18 paper. The Dip pen has an equivalent extra fine nib.

Bottle Sizes

One of the nice things we love about the standard Diamine inks is their uniquely shaped, large 80 ml bottle with a medium sized opening.  One lacking characteristic about Diamine’s Shimmering ink collection is their tall round, non-unique, 50 ml bottle with an unusually small opening.  Also unlike the standard Diamine inks, which come in two sizes (80 ml and a smaller 30 ml plastic bottle) the Diamine Shimmering inks come in only one size.

Cost

Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering ink retails for $20.00, but is available at Pen Chalet for the everyday price of $16.00 for a 50 ml bottle, which makes Diamine Shimmering ink one of the cheaper sparkle inks on the market.

Dry Time

A great characteristic of most Diamine inks is their quick dry time. Diamine Shimmering Red Lustre had a very acceptable dry time of about 5 seconds, again using a extra fine equivalent nib. The golden sheen of the Red Lustre comes out after the ink has dried.

Bleed Through

We observed no bleeding using Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering ink, even with the fully soaked cotton swab on the Rhodia Block N. 18 paper.

Feathering

We experienced no feathering on the Rhodia paper with the J. Herbin Spiral dip pen. Even after the water test, the sample lines still produced little feathering.

Water Test

We let various ink line samples dry for approximately 3 minutes, after which we ran a soaking cotton swab over the lines. This test indicates that Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering ink is not waterproof as there was substantial color smear, but the lines remained intack and only a small amount of feathering resulted.

Shading

The Diamine Red Lustre Shimmering ink itself produced very little shading, although combined with the gold flecks when properly applied produced a very unique look with the gold infused throughout the lines.

Conclusion about the Diamine Red Lustre Simmering Ink

Shimmering inks are not for everyone, but if you like and use shimmering inks, Diamine Red Lustre is a wonderful red ink color, that has great characteristics, dries fast and is reasonably priced. The dark red and gold go great together and is a great journal or letter writing ink. Pick up a bottle today!

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Andrew Nielsen
6 years ago

Well, my bottle is a boring pinky brown.