On the eighth day of Inkmas I actually got an ink that was wholly new to me! While at pen club last month, I was gifted two unique ink sample and Glare Ink Olive Brown from India was one of them. I know very little about the Glare brand. Internet searching revealed little more other than that most of their ink sales appear to occur on Ebay and the ink can be had in volumes as large as 250ml! Glare also sells fountain pens.
The listings on Ebay claim that Glare inks contain Clean-X which “protects pens in 4 ways. Prevents gumming & clogging. prevents metal corrosion, rubber-rot. Dissolves, flushes away sediments. Cleans your pen as it writes.” Mighty ambitious claims. I did not do any testing to verify or dispell these claims but it’s intriguing marketing. Suffice to say that this ink does not sound like it would be harmful to pens, is water soluble and easy to clean up.
The color is a cool brown, leaning heavily towards green. It reminds me of safari tents and the colors used in WWII movies.
The ink is dark and saturated so there is not a lot of shading and I may have over dipped a bit. The ink seems a little thick. But the price on Ebay is $8.75 per 60ml bottle with free shipping so it could probably be watered down a little if necessary and it doesn’t look too risky to pens.
In color comparisons, I was close in saying it was a bit like Diamine Safari though not quite as green. Really, the Glare Olive Brown is an oddly flat color and the other cool browns and brown-greens that I own are more sheening or much warmer.
While I find the idea of trying other inks interesting, the Glare Olive Brown is kind of iffy. There’s nothing wrong with it and I might try another color in their range because the whole marketing pitch strikes me as unusual but this particular color doesn’t do much for me.
There’s a video on YouTube with a longer description of the other ink colors if you want more details.
TOOLS
- Paper: Rhodia Uni-Blank No. 16 with 7mm guide sheet
- Pens: Empire vintage traveling dip nib holder with Zebra G titanium nib ($33.50 per 10-pack), Esterbrook #2442 nib in a Shawn Newton custom nib holder
- Swatches: Col-o-Ring Ink Testing Cards
- Brush: Blick Studio #0 Synthetic Round
- Ink: Glare Ink Olive Brown (60ml bottle for about $8.75 on Ebay)
While I haven’t seen all these inks in person, my favorite from the swabs is Sailor’s Tokiwa-Matsu. I have a bottle of that one and regularly keep it loaded in a pen. Great sheen on Tomoe River paper and it’s plenty green for me. Thanks for the comparisons, Ana!
BE CAREFUL! The “Clean-X” in this ink is by name an obvious rip-off of the “Solv-X” branded additive found in vintage Parker Quink. If the Indian ink manufacturer takes the mimicry one step further and adds Isopropyl Alcohol (a.k.a. isopropanol) to the ink as Parker did with Solv-X, the ink will either immediately or over time damage certain types of plastics and rubbers. For-example, all Celluloid pens and most TWSBI pens are at risk. Nitrile Butadiene Rubber (a.k.a. NBR, Nitrile Rubber, or Buna-N Rubber) is specially formulated to resist oils and alcohols, but NBR is rarely found in pens.
Read more about Quink and Solv-X here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quink