Ink of the Week – Sailor Amamoyoi

This week we’re going to take a look at Sailor Amamoyoi. If I’m going to be completely honest, I have no idea where I got this ink or when I got it. It was actually a surprise when I came across it in my ink drawer. I think I may have picked it up after a local meetup when I first tried Sailor Manyo Haha and was really craving a similar ink, but I really don’t remember for sure. Regardless, I don’t think I’ve ever used it before this week, so it’s definitely a new ink for me!

Sailor Amamoyoi

To start, let’s take a look at the ink itself. It is a multichromatic ink, which means that I’m not sure exactly what color it is. All of the references to it online say that it is a green ink, but in all of my writing it looks a lot more red/brown than green. I do see green in it, though, so maybe with the right pen/paper combo it might look green. It has a bit of shading and no sheen.

As you’d expect from a multichromatic ink, it has a very interesting chromatography when exposed to water. Just as with the writing, pinks and greens appear, but instead of being mingled together like with writing, they’ll separate out into separate components.

Dry times are pretty good. Once dry, I didn’t experience any smearing while I was writing or doodling. The ink is not waterproof, but a good amount of pink stays on the page when it gets wet. I would imagine you could still read almost everything that was written if it got wet.

The Pens I Used

Each week I choose five different pens to fill with the ink I’m testing. My goal is to get a variety of nib sizes and styles, as well as a mix of modern and vintage pens. Here are the pens I chose this week and some writing samples from each:

Parker 51 (vintage) – F nib

In this fine Parker nib, I think I would mistake this for a brown ink. There is a bit of green in some of the shading, but just glancing at it I mostly see brown. The same goes for my doodles. It mostly looks brown.

Pilot Metropolitan – M nib

This Pilot nib is on the fine side for a medium and doesn’t look much different from the Parker 51. It is not quite as wet, so doesn’t have as much shading. It also looks brown.

Jinhao 100 – M nib

This Jinhao nib is closer to what I think of as a medium nib. As I’ve mentioned in the past, it has somewhat irregular shading, which can be a little distracting, but definitely shows off the multi-colored nature of this ink. Here I see browns and pinks and greens.

Swan 1060 (vintage) – M flex nib

This is a big, wet vintage nib that really makes this ink look amazing. It is a solid pink-brown color with hints of something else around the edges. I really like writing and doodling with it. When flexing and making longer lines, where the ink breaks you can see the green hiding underneath.

Montblanc 149 – B nib

This broad Montblanc is just about the perfect nib to showcase this ink. I see pinks and greens mixed throughout my writing and just love the way it looks. One thing I do want to mention is that this nib was too large to easily fill from the small ink bottle. I had to angle the pen and severely tilt the bottle in order to get it to fill. For most nibs the bottle size won’t be an issue, but with very large nibs you may have to figure out another way to fill your pen.

Paper

On bad paper, this ink didn’t do too poorly. The extremely wet Swan nib bled through and feathered, but everything else did pretty well. On good paper, it did very well. I did see some bleedthrough and feathering with the Swan nib on the Stalogy paper, but all other pens and papers performed very well. Unless you have a firehose of a pen, you should be fine to use this ink on most paper. Another thing to note is that on non-Tomoe River paper it is decidedly more brown and less pink.

Cleaning The Ink Out Of Pens

Inks like this one (multichromatic and low saturation) are typically pretty easy to clean out of pens. To say that this one was easy to clean is an understatement. I don’t know if I’ve come across an ink that comes out of pens more quickly than this one. Just a few flushes with water and all traces are gone. Thanks to this, I would gladly use it in any of my pens.

Conclusions

What a pleasant surprise it was to find a bottle of Sailor Amamoyoi in my ink supplies and use it for a week. This is definitely my kind of ink and now I see why I got it in the first place, even if I can’t remember getting it. I’m a big fan of interesting colors and this checks a lot of boxes for me. It has some shading, is a brownish green that changes depending on which pen and paper you use, and is really well behaved. In a way it reminds me of Rikyu-cha, which is one of my forever inks. While this ink may not make the cut as a forever ink, I’m happy to have this bottle and will enjoy using it for as long as it lasts.