J. Herbin Orange Indien Unopened Bottle

Over on the Quo Vadis Blog they had an offer to try some of their fountain pen ink, so naturally I jumped on the chance to get a free sample of this orange fountain pen ink to try out and review.  This was especially nice since they were offering up colors that I might not particularly go right out and buy because much of my writing is done in a business setting.  Either way, it was very generous of them to offer the opportunity to try out these inks because regardless of my normal every day use, I do like to have other options for when the occasion allows.

On most sites that I looked on, they offer the 30 ml bottles of J. Herbin ink for around $7.20 to $9.00 plus any applicable shipping and taxes, you can pick up this orange fountain pen ink on Amazon.com as well.

J. Herbin Orange Indien Fountain Pen Ink inside the bottle

Just a quick peek inside of the bottle because I always think it is helpful to see the ink as it is collected on the inside of the lid, and the mouth of the bottle, plus I just like the J. Herbin fountain pen ink bottles because they are so compact and cool looking.  There are various things that I like about some of the different brands of fountain pen ink bottles, but a little part of me does wish that they were all the same size and shape so that it was easier and more aesthetically pleasing to store them in a common and out in the open place.

J. Herbin Orange Indien writing sample in a Rhodia notebook

The first writing sample (yeah, that is bold for a reason…keep reading) that I did with the Orange Indien ink was in my small Rhodia notebook.  I really like the way this ink looks, it has a nice bright, (but not too bright) color to it, I was thinking it might end up being darker once on paper, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results.  You can also see that in a quick drying test, it only took about 2-3 seconds to dry on the Rhodia paper.  The writing experience with this orange fountain pen ink was also very nice because it seems to lay down very clean and smooth lines with minimal if any bleeding or feathering.  I usually examine the writing samples under 20x magnification, and even that close up, the lines were very clean.  In the writing sample above, I used my Lamy Studio with the Extra Fine nib to test this ink with, and was very happy with the extremely limited amount of nib creep that I saw even after toting the pen back and forth to work in my laptop bag for a few days.

As I said initially in this review, I dont typically think of any shade of orange as something Id use for my normal note taking at work, but that certainly does not mean that this ink wont be put to good use.  This ink has got me thinking that using a unique color for any kind of hand written note, card, or correspondence gives it a much more personal touch instead of the usual black or blue inks that most people use.  I have a feeling that getting a nice hand written note with a different color would probably make that correspondence much more memorable to whomever the recipient is.  I probably wouldnt use it for a thank you note for a job interview (unless I interviewed with HomeDepot) but there are plenty of great opportunities that Im looking forward to for using this ink.  Thanks to the folks over at the Quo Vadis blog for opening my eyes to such a great fountain pen ink, I’m excited to get to use this again soon.

Now on to the reason I bolded the text above about “my first writing sample with this ink”

I’ve decided to add an ink log to OfficeSupplyGeek that compares different types of the same color ink, which will also mean that I will be showing all of the ink (not just fountain pen ink) on more than one type of paper so you can compare how it writes on multiple surfaces.  I’ve got the orange fountain pen ink comparison sheet started, but it will probably not be posted until tomorrow when I can have more time to make the new page for the site and get things looking how I want, but it will most likely be a link on the right hand side under the “About OfficeSupplyGeek” link.  The writing samples on the ink log (or whatever I end up calling it) will all be done on Levenger paper to keep some consistency within those results.  It will be an experiment at this point, but once it is up I would appreciate any feedback or criticism so I can make sure I am providing something useful to everyone.

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