Do you have any inks that you wanted to buy after reading great reviews that turned out less exciting than expected?
My biggest disappointment is Diamine Skull & Roses. After seeing swatches online I expected a blue ink with a visible red sheen. Unfortunately the sheen is just not there at all, it looks like an average dark blue ink, not even blurple. I’m glad I’ve only bought the 30 ml bottle.
For me, that was Noodler’s Black Swan in Australian Roses. It looked so cool and full of shading in the swatches I looked at - especially when it got dark, nearly black where it pooled.
Maybe I got another, worse batch of it or something, but for me it’s just a really uniform magenta, even on TR and wet pens. I don’t get what the hype is about, but maybe I was just unlucky.
Funnily, for me, skull and roses sheens red pretty heavily on nearly all papers. Maybe you got a bad batch, as well?
I loved Black Swan with Roses but only had a small sample. It does sound like inconsistent quality.
Don’t know when you got your bottle, but I do recall that there were some inconsistent batches with Black Swan specifically. I have two bottles and they behave very differently, with one feathering a ton and the other behaving well.
In this case, it’s possible you did indeed get a bad batch!