Levenger Cardinal Red Fountain Pen Ink Review

It has been a while since I did a fountain pen ink review so I thought Id break out the Levenger Cardinal Red (Only via Amazon now) and share it with you.  I picked this up when I bought my Levenger Coco fountain pen ink, for $12 from Levenger.

In the past I’ve purchased some red fountain pen ink, but most of them have been dark reds.  Because of that, I have been in search of a nice bright red, like stop sign red.  I read a few reviews about this Levenger Cardinal Red fountain pen ink, and it sounded like it would be a good match for what I was looking for.  When I got the bottle I was initially a little concerned because of how dark it looked in the bottle.  I always forget that just about every ink looks much darker inside the bottle than it does when you actually write with it.   As I mentioned in the previous review, these bottles have a nice shape to them, they are kind of pear-like which makes them easy to open.  They are also very stable on when  you place them down, and are trying to fill your pen.

Once I got the cap off and took a peek in the bottle, I saw that it did look slightly lighter, but is still had a deep dark red look to it.  After I loaded the ink into the pen though and started to write with it, the difference couldn’t have been more drastic.  This was exactly the color I was hoping it would be.  The Levenger Cardinal Red fountain pen ink is a bright vivid red that has that stop sign or Christmasy feel to it.  You can get a good look at it in the writing sample below.

I did the Levenger Cardinal Red fountain pen ink writing sample in my Black n’ Red notebook which always provides a very nice writing sample.  In this case it worked out very nicely with the Levenger brand fountain pen ink because the ink behaved very well.  You can see the bright color pretty easily, it actually compares well with the same shade of red that you get from a red Sharpie.  The writing sample above was done with the Levenger Cardinal Red loaded in my Lamy Studio with an EF nib.

I was really impressed with how the Levenger Cardinal Red fountain pen ink handled not only on the paper, but also in the Lamy Studio.  There was absolutely no feathering or bleed through, and the nib creep was so minimal that it was hardly worth mentioning.  I’ve had some inks that caused a ton of nib creep with the Studio, so I am always impressed with inks that don’t react this way.  The ink also dried pretty quickly, at about 2-3 seconds.  This is probably a good ink for the lefties out there who are always smearing their ink, but it does also depend on the notebook you use it in.

Overall this is a great ink, and I’ll probably leave one of my fountain pens loaded with it because I do tend to use red on a regular enough basis.  If you are looking for a nice bright red that writes well, this option from Levenger is worth checking out.  Recently I noticed that this color is now also available from Levenger via their Amazon store here.