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!

Dark Lilac is a slightly warm-leaning purple with a green (basically chartreuse) sheen.

I tested the ink out of a Platinum Plaisir 03 (fine) pen on Rhodia dot paper.

• Dry time: 10-15 seconds out of a fine nib (shockingly fast)
• Water resistance: Pretty much nil, which makes it a good candidate for blending and dilution in art
• Highlighter resistance: Smears a bit after being highlighted, but not to the point of illegibility
• Flow: Slightly wet
• Saturation: Ludicrous (here saturation refers to pigment load, not color)
• Shading: No shading
• Sheen: Ludicrous. I learned while grading papers that it even manages to sheen a little on printer paper. It is not playing games.

I've wanted to buy purple ink for a while, but this is the first one to really pique my interest. I really like the base color because I like a dark, warm-toned purple (basically eggplant-colored). And with green sheen?! I like interesting sheeners, I like green, this was a no-brainer. The sheening pigment also gives the purple a brown look that I'm really into.

I'm surprised at how fast Dark Lilac dries, considering it's wet and sheens pretty heavily. The only behavior negative is that it tends to clog up fine nibs — I had to clean it out of the fine Plaisir after a while because it kept getting stuck in the nib, but I haven't had the same issues in a medium Lamy Safari. There's also quite a bit of nib creep with it (the ink gets burped up into the nib easily), which is annoying but I haven't had anything drip out or go flying yet. Besides those minor quibbles, though, it's exceeded my expectations.