This is the Diamine Inkvent 2024 Day 25 door:

Day 25’s ink is a full 30ml bottle of Diamine Good Tidings, a black ink with what is meant to be gold Extreme Sheen. I used an Esterbrook Estie with a Journal nib to test this ink out.

I don’t think that I could be more disappointed in a “grand finale” Inkvent ink. Diamine Good Tidings would obviously need to be black because this is the Black Edition of the Inkvent calendar, but the choice to make it an “Extreme Sheen” ink was a poor one. I understand the logic behind this choice (“Extreme Sheen” is a new ink property for this year’s calendar, so of course the ultimate ink of the year needs to have this property), but the result is very underwhelming. The sheen is barely observable, and the result is just a deep black ink.

Even on original Tomoe River Paper you can barely see the sheen, and when it appears it makes Good Tidings a less attractive ink to behold, not a more attractive one. The choice of silver shimmer or a chameleon effect would have been better for this ink. When the sheen does appear it’s a sickly yellow colour, not the gold that Diamine were likely going for.

On Rhodia paper Good Tidings simply looks like a very saturated black ink, with no visible sheen. The drying times aren’t great, but if you’re looking for a solid black fountain pen ink Diamine Good Tidings is pretty good.

On Midori MD Cotton paper the sheen becomes more visible, but it’s far from what I would term “extreme sheen” and it mostly fades to the background. You can barely see hints of it in the writing in today’s bear sketch:

Only at a sharp angle and close up you can see the yellowish gold where the ink pooled, such as in the eyes. The nib I used lays down a generous amount of ink, so I would have expected to see more of the sheen than actually appeared here:

The final bear for this year is Tossi, designed by Margarete Nedballa, numbered 115 out of 399 and made by Clemens Bear (so he’s a German bear). I don’t normally like clothed bears, but I liked this fellow’s hat and the way that it matched his unusual nose, which is why I got him. He’s from a store in York called “Christmas Angels” which was wonderful and is now closed (it didn’t survive the pandemic). It was dedicated to Christmas toys and decorations all year round, and had a collectors’ teddy bear room on the top floor.

Diamine Good Tidings is a nice black ink that I will likely use quite a bit, but for the crowning glory of this year’s Inkvent it’s a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting something with more pizzazz, more of a wow effect.

That’s it for this year’s Inkvent. I will be posting a summary post with buying recommendations and an overview of all the inks over the weekend. In the meanwhile have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukah, and peaceful holidays.