This finally supplanted my old favorite ink!
I'm a sucker for good iron galls. I love the ones in particular that show you the color change as you write. Other KWZ inks I have (aztek gold, turquoise, and green gold) are all way too saturated to really show off the IG (you can dilute them with distilled water) out of the bottle, and aztek gold in particular is more of a brown than anything else (nice, but not my favorite)
But this is basically a perfect copy of my favorite IG, platinum classic citrus black. That color goes from a super pale, almost illegible yellow, to a dark, dark yellow-black in seconds. This does that! It goes down a proper pale straw yellow and within 5 seconds is legible and 20 seconds is now dark.
The shading once the ferrogallics are oxidized is nothing less than insane.
Citrus black is fun, but it's expensive and kind of hard to source. This is about 50% of the price per mL. It also comes from KWZ, a company worth supporting, and as a bonus, all the IG inks smell like cream soda. No joke.
Performance is excellent, with fast dry times, good behavior on cheap paper, sub-15 second dry times in a wet EF, next to no bleed or feathering on even copy paper when flexed. Water resistance is superb, because all that washes away is the insanely pale yellow, and the black ferrogallics are left.
This is an ink that requires a video to really explain. And I don't think the swabs of any color here on vanness are really representative of them. A modestly wet patch will turn BLACK, and the rest don't take on that brown-green hue, instead staying very dark gold
So, if you want to try iron galls, I now have to recommendations for the most dramatic color changes - Diamine Registrar's (a great, professional ink that lets you write with a double broad firehose on copy paper) and this.
