Diamine is a pretty large British ink maker that makes all types of inks, from fountain pen inks to archival stamp pads. They are quite popular among fountain pen users for their relatively inexpensive inks and their large range of colors.
One of Diamine’s older colors is their Apple Glory ink. The name is cool enough already, and manages to evoke images of those candy green apples that you used to find as kids. Not surprisingly, the ink lives up to its name and is bright and cheerful!
Diamine released Apple Glory in both 30mL and 80mL bottles and I opted for the smaller 30mL size. I wasn’t sure if I would really like such a bright color, so I took a gamble with it.
The 30mL bottles are small plastic containers with extremely thin necks. I constantly read about people complaining how thin the bottle necks are and now I finally experienced it first hand. The thickest pen I could possibly fit into the bottle was a Noodler’s Konrad. Anything bigger and I’m required to use a syringe to fill or decant the ink into a sample vial.
The ink is a bright, saturated, green color with a good amount of shading to go along with it.
The review was written on HP 32lb Premium Choice Laser with a Pilot Parallel 1.5mm. The broader nib of the Parallel shows the better than a Fine or Medium nibbed pen. The flow of this ink is quite wet, but it is still controlled and not dripping from the pen.
As for the behavior of this ink, it performs as expected on this paper, dropping off a bit on lower quality papers. There is no feathering, bleed-through, or show-through on the HP paper but I did notice a little feather and a medium amount of bleed/show-though on cheaper 20lb copy paper you normally find. Considering everything, this is not a bad ink.
I find this ink to be a very pretty and cheerful color to add to my lineup. The ink has a good amount of shading from a light color to a darker hue and dries in a reasonable time (15-18 seconds). I think this ink will find a permanent or semi-permanent position in my ink rotation and I may upgrade to a 80mL bottle once I run out.
This ink is not waterproof at all sadly. The water test was performed by placing drops of water on the grid for 20 seconds then wiped away with a tissue. The lines were barely visible after this test, but there was not much smearing, so that was good. I would not use this for anything that would possibly get wet, like envelopes and such.
This ink is available in both 30mL bottles for $7.50 or an 80mL bottle for $14.95 and can be found at many online fountain pen retailers that sell inks.
