Jinhao X750 Rose Gold, one of my favorite fountain pens. Image by unknown.

One of the first ink samples I ever got was KWZ’s Brown Pink, which all the reviews I’ve seen say is either wet or medium wet. My experience with it is that it’s dry – every pen I’ve ever tried it on, hard starts with it 😥 Even in my trusty Jinhao X750 with an M nib which even my dry inks have loved, and that has worked awesomely with all the other inks I’ve tried it with. But when I put Brown Pink in it, only hard starts and never gets going well.

I’ve read a lot of advice to add some White Lightning by Vanness to improve ink flow. I’d love to try White Lightning, but Vanness is a US shop and while they also have two inks I’m salivating after, shipping from US is crazy expensive and will also require VAT to be paid once the package arrives to Finland, making an already expensive purchase even more so. It’s just not cost effective in any way. So Vanness and White Lightning are right out!

Many also say that you can do the same with Dawn dish soap – well, we don’t have Dawn but from looks of it, it like our Fairy and others like it.  I decided to try the only colorless (because I’m not sure if Dish is colorless or yellow like Fairy) liquid dish soap my grocery store does have. I figured even if the experiment fails, nothing would be lost but a about one  milliliter of troublesome ink that I’d likely throw out anyway because it just. won’t. work. And if the pen doesn’t like it, well, it’s just a cheap Jinhao X750 so it’s not a huge loss either. I paid like 3,5USD for it and can always buy more if necessary. And dish soap is what can be used to clean out fountain pens too, so it shouldn’t do anything to it.

So the other day I injected some Brown Pink into an empty vial (which I had nicely handy from other already used up ink samples) with a blunt syringe, took a tooth pick and stirred it in the dish soap a couple of times, and then stirred the ink with it well. Then I injected the ink back into the Jinhao converter again with a syringe and low and behold, it started writing after a few seconds! The Jinhao X750 + Brown Pink ink combo work great now, even after a couple of days sitting in the pen, no more hard starts 🙂 I was very close to throwing the ink out so now I’m glad I won’t have to! It’s not a favorite ink as far as color goes and I’m not sure whether the dish soap changes it or anything, but I won’t mind using it all up over time. I might also try the Brown Pink + dish soap procedure with some other pens of mine, just to see if it works for them too.