Goodbye to Florida (Diamine Florida Blue)

I’m beginning this blog with an ending. Specifically, the end of a bottle of ink.

Diamine Florida Blue is a very bright medium blue. It’s still dark enough to be easily legible, though - not bright via eye-bleeding neon, but via intense saturation. It’s a typical well-behaved Diamine ink with plenty of shading and no sheen. There is a faint water-resistant component, so if you spill water on your notes, you should still be able to read them. It bleeds through a bit on cheaper paper.

I got my bottle of Florida Blue about 5 years ago, when I was just starting to get ‘into’ fountain pens. Back then, as a secondary school student who was only allowed to write in blue or black, a brighter blue was the closest I could get to an individualistic colour. I liked the shade so much that I planned to use it constantly, and to finish the bottle before I bought any more blue ink. So naive… I’m about to graduate from university now, and I’m only just finishing it. (And in the meantime, I bought plenty of other blue inks.)

Nevertheless, it’s the first bottle of ink I’ve finished… but not because I actually used it all. I did write a lot with it, but I also spilled some once, and I suspect some also evaporated from the cheap plastic Diamine bottle. That got me down to the last few mls. I was close to success now, but my goal was not to be achieved so soon. Because my tastes were changing.

As I settled in to my fountain pen hobby over the years, it got to the point where I simply never wanted to use this ink. It’s not that I don’t like bright colours any more. No, it’s that I started to use different colours together - multicolour is useful for uni notes, pretty journaling and appreciating more of my pens at once. I’ve come to care more about how ink colours complement and contrast each other than any individual shade.

The problem with Florida Blue is that (for my tastes) it just doesn’t look good next to other inks. It outshines subtler colours, yet it’s too dark to look good with brights, and it’s a weird shade of blue that doesn’t complement any other blue ink I own. When it stands alone on the page, Florida Blue is still a beautiful jewel tone. But that isn’t enough for me anymore: I want my ink palette to be harmonious. And Florida Blue is… overly individualistic.

Since my ink box is getting cramped, I decided it was time to say goodbye. No one else would want this old, partly evaporated ink, so I gave it one more fill in my Safari and threw the last few droplets out.

As a bonus, I found some of my schoolwork from five years ago. (The orange ink in the corner was a mixture of Diamine Pumpkin and Yellow.)