J. Herbin - Éclat de Saphir - Ink Review

Hi all and welcome to day 13 of Inkmas! 

Today’s ink is my very first J Herbin ink. It’s the Eclat de Saphir, which just sounds too fancy for my mortal hands to ever touch.

So I loaded it up and wrote a whole bunch with it!

Let’s look:

Writing

This ink goes down WET. It practically spilled out of my Nib Creaper, and I loaded it up in my Prera and it still went down went.

I do recommend to get the full effect of how rich this ink is that you really ink it up in a medium or broad Japanese nib or a medium western-style nib.

This was a pretty well behaved ink- no real feathering except on the usual office copy paper 

Dry Time

This ink is advertised as fast drying. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong but....it was pretty average for a wet ink. It was about 35 seconds on my Rhodia

I don’t know if there was something I did wrong here, or if their dry time is with a finer nib (and therefore less ink to soak into the paper), or if my Rhodia’s pages are too thick for the standards of J. Herbin’s dry time test but I wasn’t overly impressed 

Water Test

This ink isn’t water proof and isn’t advertised to be.

You can really see the brilliant blue dye with the water test, so if you use your fountain pen inks for art this is a good candidate 

Color

There have been so many blue-family colors this Inkmas but my goodness this one is standing out.

It really does have this brilliant hue to it, that’s a little hard to describe.

The color doesn’t really have any shading.

Verdict

I was pretty impressed with my first J. Herbin ink! 

I was a little disappointed in it being touted as a quick drying ink and it being pretty typical for dry time, but the beautiful blue color and the awesome flow more than negate that.

Well thanks for reading, happy Friday the 13th and I’ll see you tomorrow!