I've avoided dabbling in ink drawing without drafting with a pencil underneath because the thought of putting ink on the page without a plan fills me with irrational dread, but that changes now! (The avoidance is changing. No guarantees on the irrational dread.) This is also my first time doing plein air drawing, so there's excitement all around.

Lamy's Dark Lilac release has caused a pretty significant stir lately, to the point that somehow it ended up getting a story on the New York Times. Granted, the Times publishes many stories that hardly qualify as news or factual information, but regardless, "limited edition fountain pen ink controversy makes it onto national news publication" is not something I had on my 2024 Bingo card.

As with most internet controversies, I'm not sure how much of the controversy is real and how much of it is random people talking about controversy. (Now I'm one of those random people!)

The context is this: Dark Lilac was a wildly popular limited edition ink released in 2016. Lamy recently announced that they were going to add it to their permanent lineup, but with the caveat that the color would be different due to pigment sourcing issues. Goulet Pens has some comparison swatches.

I'm no chemist, but I am vaguely aware that pigment selection for products like makeup, soap, and (of course) ink is a pretty exact science because the pigment needs to play well with everything else that goes into the formulation. I'm not surprised that Lamy couldn't get an exact match for the original color, and I respect that they 1. disclosed that and 2. made the rerelease permanent instead of being sneaky about it.

I bought this new edition of Dark Lilac because I wasn't even using fountain pens when at the time of the first release, and I don't have any purple ink. Comparisons to the old edition aside, Dark Lilac 2.0 is great!