witches: lamy azurite

The sun sets differently in northern countries than in the Mediterranean. In north, it takes its time, setting slowly, giving enough time to turn the skies in magnificent shades of purple, red and orange. Light reflects off the clouds, the whole atmosphere becomes rose tinted. In the Mediterranean, it is unexpected and it seems like there is never enough time to sit down and watch it. The afternoon passes lazily, but the sun sets all at once. There for one moment, gone the next.

My favourite colour is green, closely followed by blue and purple. Therefore, when I was just getting into fountain pens, I wanted an ink in each one of those colours. The specifics were important though, because why love fountain pens if you’re not going to get lost in the details of the shades of ink you’re going to prefer? I wanted a warm green, not the bright pine greens like Cross Green; and a solid, mid-toned purple. The “blue” was already decided since it was the only dark blue ink at the store at the time: Waterman Mysterious Blue. I hadn’t discovered online stores or beautiful brick-and-mortar stores yet. Those brick-and-mortar stores are especially lovely in the Netherlands as they’re literally made from burgundy bricks. I can also give a presentation on different types of brick due to the contents of my course, but that’s for another day.

I was still visiting a local stationery store -also in an old brick building- which had a surprisingly large selection on fountain pens. Mostly Parker’s, Cross and Waterman’s, but also some nice Lamy’s and a small section of bottled inks. An old lady generally tends that stationery store, willowy with greying hair and spectacles. She lets you hide in from the rain while she silently judges you when you drip too much water.

On such rainy day -this time the rain had actually started pouring after I had arrived- I decided to check out this bottled ink section. I had already gotten my blue ink and got my eye on a little stack of cheap Oxford notebooks. I left the notebooks to the cash desk and started wandering around because the rain was just too much to go out like that. Their stock of green ink didn’t have what I was looking for, but they had two purple inks: Waterman Tender Purple and Lamy Azurite. Well… I tipped the bottle of the Waterman and held it up to the light to see what colour was the ink. I thought it was too warm coloured, too red -though I ended up buying it earlier this year. The willowy lady gives me headmistress vibes, so I try my best to be on my best behaviour. I secretly opened the cardboard box of the Lamy Azurite, hiding behind a bunch of shelves, sitting on the ground. Held it up to the light, and it seemed satisfactory. I had to repackage the whole thing carefully before I went to the checkout desk.

That day, I returned home with my first stack of fountain pen friendly notebooks and a second bottle of ink. Inking my pens wasn’t a dilemma; the Harley Davidson pen got the fun, purple ink and my Lamy AL-Star got the serious, blue ink. I inked up the Harley Davidson pen, opened a fresh page from my notebook and started scribbling.

Umm… WHAT?

The ink looked more green than purple. A shiny, witchy purple-green that reminded me of the cover of Roald Dahl’s Witches.

And that’s my first encounter with the beautiful monster that is sheen. I’m not complaining, I got a lovely purple ink that also shines a green. Turns out, your “fancy” ink gets a lot of use when you only have two inks and still a school to study. After that few months, I kind of forget about this ink for a while because I fell deep into the rabbit hole of inks.

Right now, only half a bottle of Azurite is left since rediscovering it recently while tidying up my pen & ink collection. My tastes had changed since I bought this ink, I prefer dusty purples to wizard-robe-purple. But this is an ink that has to be experienced once, if not loved dearly, as the sheen on it is shocking after getting used to pink-red-rust coloured sheens that are more prominent on green and blue inks. I had also watched Inky Rocks’s video on it and she mentions that the water turns a holographic coppery colour while washing the pen and that’s interesting because Azurite is a “mineral of copper ore”. After going through the Wikipedia page for it, I also learned that the word for “cyan” also comes from the Greek word for Azurite. A pretty cool ink and a pretty cool name.

Thank you for reading! The photographs are taken during sunset and they’re too dark to show the ink to its full sheen. All the letters are lined with an edge of green sheen too. I had mentioned before that I wanted to sell some pens and I like to use Reddit for these sales. You can reach my profile from u/wandering-fiction to see the listings. Reddit’s r/fountainpens group is pretty awesome too!

Spotify link for a song.