Before I get into the review, let's start with a short story, shall we?
The summer before starting college, I was put in contact with my randomly assigned roommate for the dorms. We chatted a bit about our interests and hobbies, and I asked what I thought was a totally reasonable question - did she have any colors that she absolutely hated, that she could not handle seeing every day? I've been told this is quite strange since then. She assured me she did not, though our roommate relationship didn't last past the first semester anyway.
Why would I ask such a strange question? Because I have a color like that, and it's orange. I don't mind orange as a color and I even have a few orange possessions, but if I was forced to live with someone who absolutely loved orange and decorated every inch of their space with orange, I would slowly go crazy and murder them in their sleep.
I'm guessing this slight aversion to orange is probably why I haven't tried very many orange inks. But this one was sent to me by my friend Paul and how could I refuse? (Btw, you can find his review here.) And it turns out that I actually like this shade of orange. I don't think I could use it as an everyday ink, but it's certainly been fun to play with for the past week or so.
The Cult Pens "Deep Dark" series is a line of colors produced for them by Diamine that are a bit lower on the value scale than most of their inky counterparts. This makes them particularly interesting for people like me, who aren't super into garish inks but still want to have some excitement in their writing. Of all the Deep Dark inks, I would say the orange is the least deep and dark, but it's definitely different enough to make it something special.
In terms of behavior, this ink was right on line with a lot of other Diamine inks that I've tried - decent flow, not much for feathering or bleeding on decent paper, and some shading if you are using it on ink resistant paper (the stuff I use for my ink reviews now is not the best, but I also tried it on Tomoe River and it's fantastic). But it also suffers from the same shortfall I've seen with most other Diamine inks, in that it is not super high on the water resistance factor. At the same time, most inks on the red and orange end of the spectrum are worse than this, so I'll take the small amount of water resistance offered as a victory.
Something else interesting that was brought to my attention by my manfriend, Wesley, is that this ink sort of looks like J. Herbin Rough Hematite, at least how Rouge Hematite looks when you use it on paper that leaves a good amount of the gold on the surface. Like I said before, this is not the most ink resistant paper around, but I did a swab of each to compare and they do indeed look a bit alike:
Deep Dark Orange on top, Rouge Hematite on the bottom
So, I suppose that this ink could be a good alternative to Rouge Hematite if you don't care about the actual sheen and don't want the potential maintenance issues that come with a sparkly ink.
Overall, I really like this ink, but I'm not sure I will be buying a bottle anytime soon. Being that it is a Cult Pens exclusive, I would have to order it from England and, well, the dollar is not the strongest against the pound right now and then shipping is expensive and yeah... *sigh* But, if I ever had another reason to order from Cult Pens (I hear they are nice people, so my only reason to not order is the unfavorable exchange rate), I would definitely add on a bottle of this to my order.