Diamine Salamander - a review by a novice!

Diamine Salamander 

(and the wonderful name was given to this excellent ink by Mr. Nigel Strachan)

 

For my first ever ink review (!) [please let me know if I’ve missed out any crucial tests that you would have liked to see]), I have been trying out the newest shade of ink to be produced by Diamine: Salamander. This new ink will be released for sale on the 11^th of October, 2013 – so not long to wait now!

To do this review I was writing with a Lamy Nexx Fountain Pen with a Fine nib, and it was a dip test. Here are the results!

The Colour 

 

I performed this review yesterday but as our more local customers may have noticed, the weather was gloomy, drizzly and the light really wasn’t strong enough to do this ink proper justice in any of the pictures taken on my phone. In fact the first pictures I took made the ink look black which it is far from. The shade’s actually greenish…

(A very zoomed in picture that shows the varying shades: pond green, emerald green, some jade green in there… how would you describe them?)

And as the drawing went on and the nib eventually became drier, undertones of brown and grey appeared on the page:

 

The name Salamander is perfect for this colour – it makes me think of murky ponds, and all things woodland – if you dipped your pen in an inky pond (and didn’t impale an actual salamander), all the colours you’d hope and expect to see come out on the page… and you wouldn’t have to keep dipping in the pond, either - being new to this, I assumed to test the ‘wetness’ of the ink by putting the nib in the inkwell, and then scribbling until the ink ran out. Which it didn’t. This explains the messy wiggly backtrack in the middle of the page (below) where I wrongly assumed that the ink would run out before the paper did. Not only did the ink keep going, I had enough ink left to do the water test beside it. I could have probably scribbled halfway around the page before the nib ran dry which I would say earns it an impressive rating!

The water & smudge resilience test

The Salamander ink perhaps didn’t hold up to the water test as well as its amphibian namesake would have, if I’d thrown a glass of water on that – but can you expect it to, being ink and all? (Also, in the ink’s defense, my hand slipped, and it wasn’t so much a water test as a flash flood.)  In hindsight, I should have just held the page out of the window for a few seconds.

The ink did very well with the smudge test – so well in fact that even after only a second left to dry on the paper, I couldn’t smudge it despite my best attempts...

I was writing on a Sailor tester pad of paper and it soaked in nicely. Here’s an even-more zoomed in picture so you can see the edges of the letters:

To conclude, I hope that you have enjoyed reading this review and that you may even have found it slightly useful (if you did you can follow us on Facebook where they will be announced), and that you like the look of the new Diamine Ink! We’re not allowed to start selling it until the 11^th of October, but if you’d like to pre-order yours and receive it ASAP, we do have a page for that, and we advise that you get yourself onto the list early so we can post it out to you on the day!