Review: Organics Studio Mercury Red Ink

The mercury red fountain pen ink is another one of the bottles I ordered from Organics Studio. I had been looking for a red ink to replace my Noodler's Fox Red. While this one isn't the same shade of red, it's still a nice red to have in my collection... And then I realized I have many red-type colors in my hoard collection hoard.

Just the intro...

This is the second bottle of ink I purchased from Organics Studio, in addition to the uranium green I recently reviewed. The mercury shares a lot of characteristics and qualities with the uranium green, which isn't too surprising. My favorite is that it is a wet ink - I love wet, flowing inks, even though I sometimes make a mess with them.

A pretty jam-like bottle. Actually, it totally looks like jam based on the color and shape. DO NOT EAT. In large quantities. Do not feed to your children and/or pets and/or annoying neighbors.
I love the hand labelling except it's rubbing off so I'll have to touch it up myself.

I did note there were little crystals in the bottle, even after swirling the bottle around to mix up any settled pigment. I was concerned this would affect the flow or come out of the nib and leave behind crystals on the page but this didn't happen with any fountain pens. I assume the little crystals were just left behind on parts of the glass where the ink had sloshed around. Again, this reminds me of J. Herbin's anniversary ink. This has not affected the ink's performance and when I roll my converter, the ink moves freely, without any globs or chunks in it, so all looks well!

Note the crystals on the mouth of the bottle.

The ink is well behaved - no bleed through or show through on the Maruman Lifetime Notebook paper (75 gsm), and very little bleed through in a Staples sugarcane based notebook, despite the very thin paper! No feathering, and very good flow. The ink is only somewhat saturated. 

My swab sucks. I've been trying to save the Earth and not use Q-Tips but my paintbrush appears to be a failure of sorts.

The drying time is a good 30 seconds here because it's both a very wet ink, and the Maruman Lifetime Notebook paper is very smooth. Water resistance in this notebook is very low.

I was surprised to note the ink is more water resistant on "cheaper" paper - in this case, the Staples sugarcane based notebook, which I absolutely love - rather than smooth/coated paper of Maruman's Lifetime Notebook.

Water resistance seems much higher in the Staples sugarcane notebook!

I thought it was an interesting statement. And I believe very true! However, more importantly, notice how great the ink looks on the page - no feathering, no blobs or anything. Very pretty, and this is again on the thin Staples sugarcane based paper. 

Ugh. My apologies for my atrocious writing. Sore wrist this day and I was lazily trying to write to avoid further discomfort. This was done with a J. Herbin glass dip pen. The first sample of mercury red is written with a Lamy Safari EF nib, and the last with the same glass dip pen, to show the color difference with wetness.

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Price

Organics Studio - $12.50 for 55 ml - the first four colors are available!

Sample - $2.50 for ~ 5ml
Goulet Pens - $12.00

Overall

This Mercury Red ink is a really nice deep red - not light and bright red - but a darker, more elemental red. Get it? Elemental? ZING. As I mentioned, I love wet flowing fountain pen ink so this one is very suitable for me. It behaves wonderfully on both premium and regular paper, and in some cases, even better on regular paper. This ink is very easy to clean out of pens and not fussy to handle! A great red ink for when you want to use red but don't want it to look like a bunch of corrections! Plus, Organics Studio is a pleasure to deal with.