Greetings! 😀 I have another ink review ready and this time my choice fell upon Diamine Oxford Blue! This ink has of course been reviewed by a lot of people already but I thought I would share my thoughts on this one because it was the second ink I bought from Diamine back when I was getting into the hobby. 🙂 (The first was Diamine Sapphire Blue which I’ll definitely cover in a couple of weeks).

Before we continue I just want to give a shout out to the Fountain Pen Companion! Thanks to this nifty website it’s really easy to track your inks, participate in leaderboards and share your collection with others! 😀 If anyone wants to have a look at mine, you can see check it out here.

If you would like me to do a review of one of the inks from my collection let me know in the comments below, on the PenAddict Slack on reddit or through e-mail. 😉

If you’re interested in the review process please check out this blog post. I’ve written it down in detail. Reviews in the future might have updated methodology but I’ll let anyone know if anything changes! 😉

1. Introduction and personal thoughts

Diamine is a UK 🇬🇧 based company which creates all kinds of inks for different purposes. They have been around since 1864 and thanks to this heritage I think we can safely deduce that they know a thing or two about how to make inks. They offer a large assortment of colors (over 100 actually) so it’s more than likely that they have a color you’ll like. They are also fairly inexpensive thus they are easily accessible to anyone, especially if you’re from Europe.

The ink is available in 30 ml plastic/glass bottles and 80 ml glass bottles. I myself have got one in the 30 ml bottle as anything bigger than 50 ml is a huge commitment (especially since I have enough ink already to last me a lifetime). Before moving onto the ink itself I would just like to praise how neat their 30 ml plastic bottles are since look great and can be placed nicely next to each other. The downside is that the mouth of the 30 ml plastic bottle is really small and a lot of pens might not fit through it. This won’t be so bad if you use converters or refill with a syringe but a piston filler will be impossible to fill with these bottles.

Their 30 ml glass bottles on the other hand are better because the mouth on it is wide enough for a pen to go through it. My only nitpick is that they have a generic Diamine label on them instead of the bespoke ones you get with the plastic bottle. Pennonia actually has both kinds available at the moment but I think once our current stock goes out we’ll move over to the glass bottles. They feel more premium and are more convenient to fill a pen from. (I’ll miss the fancy labels though 😭)

So thanks for bearing through the intro and the talk about the bottles! Let’s move on to the ink! Okay so Diamine Oxford Blue is a really dark blue-black ink which from my experience tends look like black at first glance instead of blue. You definitely need a lot of light to get the glimpse of the blue shade. The ink flows nicely out of the pen and it’s all around great to write with. I honestly have no complaints, it’s a good ink with a nice color. So thanks for reading! See you next time!

Okay I was just kidding about saying goodbye, but that’s the tl;dr (too long;didn’t read) summary. Now I know I said it’s a good ink but naturally it’s not a perfect ink. It is so saturated and since it is wet, it’s has minimal shade and if you lay it down thick enough it will bleed through the page. I used 80 g/m2 Rhodia paper and at the tails of the letters there are some specks from bleedthrough. I can live with it though, it’s not so noticeable and I’m not that annoyed by them anyway.

Now if you’re into sheening inks I bet you already knew that this ink has a nice red sheen. I tried to take photos but honestly they turned out really bad because my lighting sucks (and I usually only have time to work on Pennonia after it gets dark 🙁 ) so I only have the scanned writing samples to show you this time BUT the red sheen is absolutely noticeable on them. 😀 Please remember to click on them to view them in a high resolution!

Water resistance is okay for it being a standard dye ink. Your writing will definitely not be washed away if you accidentally knock over your glass of water!

Here’s a HEX value for the ink: #171740

2. Writing samples

Here are the writing samples. I used a Hero 395 with Rhodia 80 g/m2 paper. Click on the images to view them at full resolution (and without WordPress’ JPEG compression).

3. Similar Inks:

4. Extra photos / scans:

5. Products featured:

Thanks for checking out the review! I hope it was helpful and informative! Check back again to catch up on new reviews or hang around in the Pen Addict Slack where I’ll post whenever I make a new one. See you until next time!