In the winter of 2020/2021, Diplomat stepped beyond standard black and royal blue, and released a series of fifteen inks. With the success of their wide variety of color choices in the Aero pen, I think it was a great decision to expand their ink range! Made by Octopus Fluids, there’s a nice selection of colors in the series. The inks come in the nice, very familiar bottles favored by several German ink brands.

This is Diplomat Orchid (also available in Octopus Fluids’ own line as Orchidee.) I love the bold vibrancy of this very pink magenta. It’s full in color and quite saturated, but not to an uncomfortable degree. If you like magentas or bold dark pinks, a full page of writing in Orchid looks fantastic! The color brings many inks to mind, but good comparisons were surprisingly hard to find, and it didn’t match the ones I first thought it might.

There are hints of sheen in the swatches, but in writing it only really stood out on Midori MD. Color varies based on the paper you choose. There are flashes of stroke end shading on some, and fairly consistent medium to dark color variation on most, but I wouldn’t call it a strong shading ink. This ink’s superpower is the color itself.

Writing performance was more consistent than previously reviewed Diplomat Orange. You still need to pair it with compatible paper, but the choices are more plentiful. Strokes are clean on most, but I found a little micro-feathering on Kokuyo and Rhodia. It performed well on a number of coated papers, but uncoated papers were consistently good.

For such a bold ink, show-through was less pronounced than I anticipated. Bleed-through was only found in the few, most heavily saturated spots on a full page of text. Drying time was average or better, so that’s another plus for Orchid.

This is a great color, and there’re surprisingly few that really match it well. Writing performance was good overall, too. Stay away from Kokuyo and Rhodia, but it’s nice on many, both coated and uncoated. I like Orchid, and I think you will, too!

Keep scrolling down for more writing samples, the swatch card, swatch card comparisons, and the Diplomat bottle.