Sailor Gentle Grenade

Sailor's Jentle Grenade is a dark maroon color, that looks a bit like a red wine. It behaves well on the papers I've tried it on, though you'll find a few dots on the back of cheaper papers. I say (in the review below) that the flow is on the wet side of medium, but I need to mention that this ink does seem to dry up in my nib faster than I like. It was a bit of a hard-starter. That's a little annoying to me. It's one of the things which makes me hesitate to hand someone a pen filled with this ink. It looks cool, but if they put the nib on paper and it doesn't write they're going to get a bad impression of the pen, and perhaps fountain pens in general.

This minor draw-back has to be balanced against the awesome sheen on this ink. If it were just a normal red/maroon with some pink undertones I would probably write it off. Fortunately, it has an awesome sheen that really redeems the ink. I bet this ink would look awesome from a dip pen. Someone should check that out. I don't actually have any dip pens.

Whoops, I swatched the wrong ink there...

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You can see, above, how Grenade stacks up against several other reds and oranges.

The 13 second dry-time isn't all that odd on Rhodia paper, but I expected it to dry faster since it tends to dry in the nib. 

So, how about water-resistance? Check out the video below. 

Spoiler:

It could be worse. You can see the pink in this ink when you get it wet, but quite a lot of the ink sticks to the page. 

One final thought about this ink and the company: I've only gotten to try a couple of these Sailor inks. A lot of my ink samples come from the Goulet Ink Drop program, and Sailor has just dropped Goulet Pen Company from their list of authorized dealers. According to the Goulets, this is because they only stock the inks and not the Sailor pens. Apparently, this isn't good enough for Sailor, so they're not selling to the Goulets at all. I really don't like seeing this kind of strong-arm tactic from a company. Sailor makes some great nibs, and their ink offerings seem strong, but the way they're treating this vendor is pretty distasteful.

If you're looking for some Sailor products, you can find them over at Anderson Pens. Brian and Lisa have just announced that they're going to be carrying the Sailor line, and they can get all of the pens, nibs, and inks that you might want.