Lamy Crystal - Turmaline

Lamy Crystal - Turmaline - Ink drop

If you appreciate saturated, peacock blues and greens, you’ll love today’s ink! This is Lamy Turmaline, a 2020 limited edition that matches the 2020 limited edition AL-Star. The namesake semi-precious gem is found in a variety of colors, including a blue green quite similar to this beautiful ink.

Lamy Crystal - Turmaline - Shades and sheen

This ink is extremely difficult to accurately capture on film. The real vibrancy and clarity of the strong color doesn’t completely come across. The ink starts as a peacock blue, and it dries to a peacock green. It’s rich, and very saturated, and a nice shading ink, with bold light accents on stroke ends. As the splatter shows, it’s also a sheening ink, with a nice cinnamon red border to areas of pooling, and stroke edges in writing. It doesn’t distract and acts as a nice decoration.

Lamy Crystal - Turmaline - Ink swatch card

Lamy Turmaline is a nice writing ink, particularly on premium papers. It’s fairly wet, and very smooth. Strokes were crisp and clean on premiums, with nice shading and a strong stroke halo. On office copy, there was slight micro-feathering, but I don’t think it’s enough to be of concern. Shading was weaker here, and there was no halo, but I’d still say it’s nice on office copy. Drying was 15-25 seconds on premiums, and 5 on office copy. Overall, I liked it best on Kokuyo.

I’m a fan of Lamy Turmaline. It’s beautiful on the page, and it performs well. It also comes in Lamy’s T52, 50 ml bottle with the integrated blotter paper, and it’s priced right!