Black Friday (and the related Small Business Saturday, In-Between Sales Sunday, Cyber Monday…) has come and gone and packages ordered online last week are now being delivered. During these sale days, I happened to see a few new inks pop up on Vanness Pens – all Penbbs inks. Ok, I admit it was more than a few. It was 34 new inks. Luckily, I have amazing willpower; I only purchased samples of each.
One downside of ordering this time of year is that the Post Office is rather busy. Typically packages from Vanness arrive at my home within three (sometimes only two) days. I didn’t receive my ink this time until yesterday afternoon, so I had a busy evening swatching inks! Fortunately, this is one of my favorite things to do.
I do admit, though, that 34 inks is too much for me to review one by one. But how can I best show these ink colors if readers are curious and can’t tell the colors from the bottle labels? Rather than trying to review every ink, I have grouped them. These first six photos are the swatches in numerical order.
#381 through #392 are the large style hexagonal bottles, have no particular theme that I could see and cost $16 for a 60mL bottle.
#501 through #509 are themed on flowers and cost $18 for 35mL square bottles.
#510 through #524 are not named (please ignore the Midnight Blue label on #515) and also cost $18 for 35mL bottles.
I this second group of photos, I have grouped the inks by color and added a swatch of inks that are familiar to most people and can be found online easily if not. Hopefully these will give a reference to place these colors in the mind of the readers.
My favorites: #381 – an orange-yellow coral color, #501 – an opaque true yellow that doesn’t fade into the paper, #505 Azalea – a dusty pinkish purple, #507 Lily of the Valley – a dusty teal, #511 – purple, of course, #514 – a bright turquoise that has a faint halo in writing, and #516 – even on a paper towel, this black didn’t break down into separate colors.
I hope this presentation helps to show the colors of these inks. Pick out your favorites – samples are $3.50 or $2.50 for 4mLs so it is plenty of ink for trying out the ink – or pick a couple of bottles. Penbbs inks are one of the best value inks for the money!
Tools:
- Paper: Musubi Tomoe River Refill ($30-35 USD)
- Ink: Penbbs Season 26 and Flower series (Vanness Pens, $18 for 35mL or $16 for 60mL)
- Swatch Cards: Col-o-ring ink testing cards ($10 for 100 card pack)
DISCLAIMER: All materials used in this review were purchased by me. Please see the About page for more details.
Jessica–For the writing, did you use a calligraphy nib? What pen did you use?
Thanks for this review. I see several I may want to purchase, at least as samples.
I am SO grateful for all the work you’ve done photographing these inks!!!! I do not understand why Vanness lists the ink without a color photo…. which means I waste so much time going back and forth to Google to try and find the color. You have saved me a heap of time and money. Happy New Year!
Vanness has been understaffed (and overworked) lately so they want to get the products listed as soon as they arrive even if they haven’t had time to make the swatches yet. And making pretty swatches and photographing them and color correcting them takes a lot of time, we can attest to that!
Thank you for sharing these swatches. I was curious about the inks and now I know which ones I want to get.
Thanks for the feedback, Nina! I knew that the Vanness group was going to be shorthanded – plus the holidays are super busy. I had a lot of fun discovering the colors each time I opened another sample vial!