First, it’s the name. “Blue Night” leads me to expect a dark blue, like an indigo touched with black. The label on the ink bottle doesn’t help. It is a deep night sky touched with purple light.
Caran d'Ache Blue Night
The ink itself is gray, gray, gray. It is not Blue Night.
One of my favorite ink lines is CdA’s Colors of the Earth. I like the concept (colors inspired by nature) and the bottles (cubist crystal candy). My first favorite was Storm, a deep brownish purple, like the halo of a bruise. My second was Saffron, which is more intense dry than wet.
Caran d'Ache Colors of the Earth sampler
Recently, I’ve been liking Caribbean Sea, a teal-tinged turquoise, and Blue Night, which is not really blue, more like a gray that sometimes has the tiniest hint of blue and sometimes green. These ink samples are on Paperblanks notepaper, scribbled with a glass pen.
The Tibaldi Iride arrived a month ago in a plain, ink-stained Pilot box. I’d asked the seller to not send it in its de rigeur crystal coffin, to avoid damage in transit. Besides, the box is never as important as the pen it holds. I liked the Tibaldi Iride for its celluloid. Celluloid is a classic pen material. It always looks like refined candy to me, creamy and iridescent all at once. It comes in many colors and combinations, and I have yet to see a celluloid I don’t like.
The Iride’s celluloid is warm, rust and orange and mocha and the wrong side of mother-of-pearl, like sunset caught in different shards of windows. It has a vacuum-type filler that requires a strong grip, so I get to exercise my carpal muscles as I load the pen with ink.
It is not a small pen. The Iride is almost as long as a Montblanc 149, with a similar girth. It feels more ergonomic in the hand, and I believe a lot of that is due to the celluloid, the warmth its natural origins impart.
The nib is fairly firm, with a hint of spring. I ordered a fine nib, and it wrote smoothly, with absolutely no hesitation.
In the picture beside the Iride is a Molteni Antonella. Molteni is a seller’s private imprint, and Bexley manufactures the pens. The Antonella I have is made of green ebonite, with gold trim and a two-tone Bexley fine nib. It is now filled with Caran d’Ache’s Amazon ink, a green of surprising intensity and freshness. I use it to write holiday cards and felt happy.
