Tono and Lims - True Love

Tono & Lims - True Love - Ink drop

True Love is a scented, limited-edition ink from Tono & Lims. It’s one of several limited editions released in January 2021 that would normally only be available at pen shows. Generally, I imagine rose or valentine red to be the color associated with true love, but in this case, it’s the scent of the ink that matches the name. Each pen stroke graces the page with the fairly strong, yet still pleasant scent of roses.

Tono & Lims - True Love - Color Range

Visually, this is a gorgeous, mango yellow orange, that’s full of life, and positive energy. There’s a lot of color variation, too. On premium papers, it blends from a bright, dark mandarin orange to a vibrant mango yellow. On copy paper, it’s a more reserved orange that lightens slightly to an orange juice yellow. The splatter displays rich, textured, orange-red areas of pooling, which show as a mild halo edging in writing. This is a beautiful, bright ink, but it’s still quite pleasant for the reader.

Tono & Lims - True Love - Ink Swatch Card

As a writing ink, True Love is wet, and flows nicely on the page. Strokes were clean and sharp on all six test papers. Shading was visible on all six, as well, but stroke halo only showed on Kokuyo, Fabriano, and Apica. It isn’t the fastest drying ink, but it was consistent at 15-25 seconds on both coated and uncoated premium papers, and 5 seconds on office copy. This is a very nice writing ink.

True Love is a beautiful ink on the page, and a pleasure in the pen. I don’t normally love the scent of artificial rose, as it’s so often overdone and overpowering, but here it was really restrained and quite nice. It worked well on all papers tested. I preferred the nice shading and edge halo on Kokuyo, but it was very nice on uncoated papers, too. If you can find a bottle, grab it!