distracting: kwz stardust blue fountain pen ink
The dark settles over the city like a heavy blanket, muffling out the sounds and blurring the distances. Streets are not very busy, but they are alight with the Christmas lights. There’s a steady hum of cars and other city noises, and it’s otherwise quiet. The cranes of the many construction works blink red in the dark sky, their shapes darker against the sky. A leftover wind howls between the buildings sometimes, quickly passing on the heels of yesterday’s storm. It feels like midnight, but it’s 7pm and I need to make dinner already.
This ink is unbelievable.
Look, hear me out. I am not the biggest shimmer ink person. I like them, but don’t use them often for the higher maintenance and because you have to shake them a little bit to keep the shimmer in suspension. That means that I need to take a break from writing, wave the pen around a little bit. Lately, I’ve taken a liking to them because the sunlight is scarce in December, and the shimmer catches the desk lamp’s light beautifully. It’s tough when the sun’s up only for a couple of hours, and then it’s cloudy anyway.
Enter, this picture. It’s during the Dutch Pen Shows where the owner of KWZ was showing how these new inks stay in suspended in the solution. You can see that the one at the right has no shimmer stuck at the bottom and the left one does. I was super excited about this.
Who wouldn’t be, when the inks look like magic? I especially liked Firecracker and with a line named “All That Glitters” I was sold. Really badly. Unfortunately for me, Fontoplumo only had Fields of Barley left at the show. An ink that sells out at midday? Sign. me. up.
I went later to buy the Stardust Blue while picking up some other things. Afterwards, I let both inks just sit for a couple of months, I was traveling and didn’t want to carry high maintenance shimmer inks around during the hot summer months. I wanted to ink up TWSBI Swipe with the Stardust Blue and turns out that pen wasn’t good with shimmers for some reason, and that really discouraged me from using them.
Then, at last, I was using this Leonardo Momento Zero with a wet medium nib, and I had a brilliant idea. The shimmer particles in KWZ inks are smaller, so I wondered if they were as good in finer nibs.
Turns out, they’re not only good, they’re amazing. I quickly went through two converters of ink in a couple of weeks. I didn’t even clean the pen in between because the ink just flows so good that it really didn’t feel necessary. From my previous experience, KWZ inks have a slight gel-like feel to them, very well-lubricated but not watery. The shimmer inks continue in that regard. It flows out of the pen easily, requiring minimal agitation to mix the shimmer particles again and the pen doesn’t dry out if it’s unused for some days.
Of course, I did leave it to see how well the shimmer suspension will hold up. With the above mentioned months of unuse, the ink did require some minutes of shaking to get the shimmer going again. Afterwards, it required minimal shaking to get it to work before inking, and the pen can lay for days, you’ll give it a good swirl and it’ll be ready to go.
The drying time is also pretty decent, it didn’t take very long to dry, and the ink doesn’t smear after it’s completely dry. It did take about two hours to dry when I put it on with a paintbrush, as expected. I put so much ink on the page that it looked like a bubble. The end result is a beautiful sea of silver. I think the shimmer is mostly silver at least, though I catch some rainbow iridescent ones in between. It glitters in all colours in a way.
Sometimes I ink up my partner’s pens with a surprise ink and yesterday he came back with a very big grin on his face. I hadn’t told him this was a glitter ink. Turns out he was sitting under a light in the lecture hall and when he wrote with this ink, he was so distracted by how shiny and pretty the ink is that he had to switch pens at one point. I had felt like this shimmer ink has a bit more shimmer ink than the others I have, so it’s nice to see I’m not the only one that thought so.
The ink bottles are round and squat 30 ml bottles with a huge opening. It’s easy to get a pen in there, though I wonder how east it’ll be to get the ink when the ink level gets a bit low. I like that the label has little twinkles on it coloured in with the colour of the ink. It adds a personal touch.
Honestly, I want all the colours of this lineup. It’s so good that I’ve been rarely reaching for other pens while journaling. A part of it is the novelty, because most of the other shimmer inks I own has chunkier glitter in it. This ink simply works, and works well. It’s not just a gimmick that doesn’t really change the ink. I’m curious how the shimmer inks will continue to evolve, because compared to other fountain pen inks, they’re relatively new. The first one seems to have came out in 2010 with the J Herbin’s anniversary series, and now we have a shimmer ink that barely needs shaking.
Thank you for reading! I love writing positive posts about things I love and it has been great. I sometimes feel like showing the love makes it less valuable or less critical, but I think not. Sometimes things are just great, and it’s important to enjoy that too! The unfortunate part is that there's a storm here right now, so the colour balance of the pictures are a bit off.
Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored, all photos and opinions are my own.