What does day 3 of the 2022 Inkvent calendar bring?

Something new and exciting: a chameleon ink:

Day 3’s ink is Diamine Solar Storm, a dark purple chameleon ink. What is a chameleon ink, you may ask? I did too. When I saw the label on the bottle I thought that there must be some new ink trend that started when I was abroad and I missed it. Was that the new name for the hue shifting inks that Sailor popularised?

No it was not. A quick internet search revealed that chameleon inks were a new kind of shimmer ink from Diamine, first offered in the Inkvent 2022 calendar. What is special about them is that the mica in them is very fine, and so the shimmer shifts colour as you tilt the page and view your writing from different angles.

Very cool and impossible to photograph (you’ll perhaps get a feel for the effect in a video review). There are angles where you can barely see the shimmer, and others where it is dazzling, angles where it’s golden green and others where it’s silvery. The ink itself is a wonderfully dark, dusky and rich bluish-purple with a good amount of shading. Even without the chameleon effect it would have been lovely.

Comparing Solar Storm with last year’s Stargazer, there’s something more subtle about the chameleon effect that makes it more appealing to me than the shimmering and sheening Stargazer. It may be the newness bias, and it may be that I’ve grown tired of blue inks with lots of red sheen, but if chameleon inks are the next big thing, I’m not against them. Solar Storm is a fantastic ink, with a very peculiar name choice for a Christmas themed calendar. However, if it will clean out well out of my Pilot Metropolitan cursive medium fountain pen, then it is definitely going on the shopping list for a full bottle.