Wearingeul The Secret Garden
Ink Review #72
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
Wearingeul The Secret Garden is a light pastel green with a mix of gold and rose golden particulates. The base color is on the pale side, but still fresh and vibrant; perfectly appropriate for a spring garden green tone. There’s some light shading with a soft cut between light and dark tones where the ink pools. There’s not a lot of tonal variation in normal writing, but the ink comes out quite a bit darker when the ink is laid down heavily enough (as visible in the ink droplets). The two shimmer colors are especially striking when laid down heavily enough, but in my tests, the concentration of shimmer wasn’t very high, and I mostly observed light speckles across the surface of the writing.
Ink Splat
Ink Droplets
Performance on paper:
Most fountain pen-friendly papers should be able to handle this ink just fine. There was minimal bleed-through on the Kokuyo paper (mostly where the dry times were circled with a wet flex nib) and no other observable bleeding or feathering on the other pages. The dry times were slightly above average, with most of the nib sizes drying around 10-15 seconds. The water resistance isn’t great, but faint traces left after water exposure may be legible.
Written on Mitsubishi Bank paper with an FPR Ultraflex Nib (5.5), This is the kind of shimmer that’s possible if you can get the ink to flow enough.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
The Secret Garden’s performance is okay, but not great. It has a very dry flow and poor lubrication. I ran into clogs with both the Fine and Extra fine nibs, and consistent hard starts with the Fine, Broad, and Stub nibs; especially on Midori paper, which this ink didn’t seem to like very much. While I was able to get it to work in the end, I did have great difficulties getting this ink to work with a flex nib as well. This ink would benefit greatly from a feed that flows well to get the best of it. Otherwise, my best experiences were using the medium nib, where the flow and shimmer distribution felt consistent without any performance issues.
Cleaning the color out of the pen was easy enough: it didn’t take more than a single flush with a bulb syringe, but there was a serious rose gold film left along the inside of the barrel of the pen. This isn’t something that’s uncommon with shimmer inks, but it was especially unsightly in this case, and it required the pen to be disassembled to rub out with a cotton swab.
Performance in a pen: 5.5/10
Performance on paper: 9.5/10
Color saturation: 4/10
Sheening: 0/10
Shading: 5/10
Dry time: 7.5/10
Water resistance: 2/10
Ease of cleaning: 5/10
Shimmer: Yes
My personal thoughts...
When I first got my hands on this ink, I was looking over my initial swatches and could have sworn that I was seeing some red shimmer. I was surprised to find out that it was only a mix of gold and rose gold shimmer. That description really downplays what this ink can truly look like because these two shimmer colors combined create a beautifully dramatic effect against the freshness of this “garden green” (to borrow from Wearingeul’s own marketing copy for the ink). Of course, it does need a pen that can lay down enough ink to get the most out of it, so keep that in mind.
As far as how well this ink represents the literary work it’s named after? Well, in the book, the titular garden is depicted as a vibrant and blooming haven hidden away within the gloomy and imposing atmosphere of Misselhwaite Manor (after being recultivated, at least). I don’t think there are any rigid guidelines here to follow — Wearingeul captured the essence of the story well enough.
Written in a Leuchtturm1917 Notebook with a Laban 325 “Forest Green” (Medium)
More images/info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 with 5 nib units including an EF, F, M, B, and 1.1mm stub, All nibs are tuned to perform at the same wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook
A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook