Diamine - Peacock Flare

Diamine Peacock Flare - intense shimmer!

Peacock Flare was one of the 2018 additions to Diamine’s Shimmering series. Diamine generally makes some of the most consistent shimmer inks on the market. It comes in a 50ml, silver-capped bottle, which helpfully indicates that it’s a silver shimmer ink.

Visually, I think this base and shimmer combination is a natural, and it matches the name perfectly. The base color is a lovely, peacock green blue. Inks in this part of the color spectrum tend to either lean too heavily blue, resulting in more of a turquoise or even aqua blue, or too heavily green, and jump to the green category. Diamine gets it just right in this lovely peacock blue. The rich, platinum sparkle of the shimmer jumps off the blue background. It’s a nice, fine-particle shimmer that looks good individually, or blanketed across strokes. Areas of pooling in the splatter, enjoy a gorgeous plum-red sheen edge, and hints of this can be seen at the ends of strokes on some premium papers.

Diamine Peacock Flare - ink swatch card and drying

As a writing ink, it performed well on all four premium papers. Strokes were crisp, and well-defined. There were darkened stroke edges (particularly on Apica), but not a true halo. Shading appeared best on Kokuyo, but overall, it was overtaken by shimmer (a common trade-off for the dazzle of shimmers). Drying times were from 15-30 seconds on premium papers, and performance was very nice on all four. However, on office copy paper, it suffered from feathering, although shading benefited from a fast 5-second drying time. It’s usable on office copy, but not advisable.

This is a gorgeous ink. It’s smooth-flowing, and it didn’t cause me any problems with clogging or cleaning. It’s also a nice writing ink. You need to stick to premium papers for best results, but with an ink like this, why waste it on anything else? Enjoy!

November 2020