A selection of different red inks, next to each other.

As you can see, I have a number of red inks, which is odd because I rarely use them – I annotate things in red but don’t write anything apart from that in it, and don’t draw or colour with the stuff. Still, Diamine make some gorgeous reds, and their 30ml bottles are inexpensive.

From top to bottom for the benefit of search engines:

• J Herbin 1670
• J Herbin Rouge Caroubier
• Diamine Poppy Red
• Diamine Oxblood
• Diamine Monaco Red
• Diamine Crimson (the new, recent, formulation)
• Diamine Red Dragon
• Diamine Syrah

and some other reds not from bottled ink, why not, pixels are cheap:

• A Sharpie fineliner
• A Uni-Ball Signo, fairly common rollerball gel pen
• A fat Sharpie marker

All of the bottled ink samples were written with a J Herbin glass dip pen. The paper is Black n Red 90gsm lined, from an A4 ringbound book.

You can see that the Syrah really isn’t desperately red and is more of a reddish mauve – I do like violets/mauves/purples and have a few so might include it in a future comparison post on those.

In order, we have:

• Diamine Grey. Slightly water-resistant, in that it is visible afterwards and almost readable, but not pretty.

• Sailor Sei-Boku – the greenish blue “nanocarbon” Sailor ink. As befits an ink by a company called “Sailor” this ink remains identical no matter how much it is dunked into water. Sei-Boku is termed “archival quality” so really should be able to cope with being dunked in a sink.

• Waterman South Seas Blue, which is really a turquoise. Here we see the difference between a sailor and the sea. South Seas Blue, when exposed to water, is overjoyed and leaps off the page in ecstasy, to join its brother and sister molecules.

• A black Sharpie marker which I happened to have lying around. No nonsense here. Water? Why should it care about water? Try bleach or napalm to erase this sort of thing.

• Diamine Monaco Red which surprised me a little (though Diamine inks are not noted for water resistance generally). Monaco Red just vanishes with barely a trace. I’ll grant that that example of Monaco Red was likely contaminated with a lot of J Herbin Rouge Caroubier, since it normally dries to a brownish “there’s been a murder sir” colour, but even so… evidence has been eradicated.

• And then I had run out of inked pens so decided to try a pencil, specifically a 3B lead in a Caran d’Ache clutch pencil. Pencils have something of a reputation (in my mind anyway) for being impermanent, given that they can be erased with a piece of rubber, but graphite particles embedded into the surface layer of paper are apparently entirely non-bothered by the presence of water.

So. I have picked one ink – Waterman Black, a reliable and fast-drying ink, good for all sorts of paper – and I am planning to use that for the next… well, I had originally thought “month” but that might be a bit too long. Fortnight, let’s say. I have loaded all of my normal pens with it, apart from the Kaweco Sport that I have loaded with red and use to make corrections and annotations after the fact (this does not count; this piece of asceticism is only for writing pens). The idea is that I will concentrate more on the actual writing. Let’s see how effective this actually is, in practice.