Diamine Inkvent 2023, Day 19

The Ink

Day 19: Cinnabun - Scented

Cinnabun is a cinnamon-scented (obv), medium cinnamon-brown ink. Diamine does a good job at matching colors for namesake objects, like their flower ink series, or this cinnamon-based ink. The scent, OTOH, is weird to my nose. It’s not fully cinnamon, like sniffing a jar of ground cinnamon from the pantry. It actually smells like what I remember Johnson & Johnson baby lotion (the pink stuff; I don’t know if it’s the same formula these days) to smell like, with a hint of cinnamon scent as an “aftersmell”. It’s so strange.

The feathering…yikes!

I only have one other Inkvent to compare to, but so far the scented inks that are in last and this year’s Inkvents have been ridiculously wet. We had Sweet Dreams on day 7 and it was quite wet, but did not feather as badly as Cinnabun on the 52gsm Tomoe I’m using for swatches:

And last year’s Spruce and Pick Me Up did not feather like Cinnabun. Admittedly, the long blade nib in the nib holder is not a fine nib by any means, but the wetness of these inks make me not really want to use them (also, I do not like the colors for Spruce, Pick Me Up, or Sweet Dreams).

I actually don’t mind Cinnabun’s color, so if I can find a good fine nib to use the ink in, I might at least write with it a little.

The first comparison ink I thought of was KWZ Honey, and it is very close in shade, almost identical as I look at the swatches side-by-side.

Last year’s Inkvent had a yellow-amber ink called Three Kings which is in the ballpark, but more yellow/orange than brown.

Robert Oster Caffe Crema may also be a very close match, but my old sample of it has a pronounced green tone that I’m not sure is visible in the ink normally. This also seems a bit more “dense” of an ink compared to Cinnabun.

I swatched Robert Oster Heart of Gold without its shimmer for another ink comparison (perhaps for Walnut from a few days ago?), and it seems like a decent match.

Since I didn’t want to have a ridiculously feathered writing sample for the quote, I decided to put a little of Cinnabun in one of my Platinum Preppies and tried it on a scrap edge of the Tomoe swatch paper. It behaved well with a tiny amount of feathering, as you can see, so I used it for transcribing the quote in my Traveler’s Notebook standard insert.

The Quote

Okay, so this quote probably breaks my theme because You’ve Got Mail is not fully a Christmas movie. There is a part of the timeline where it is Christmas, but it’s not enough of the plot to really call it a Christmas movie. For some reason, though, the last few years I’ve been rewatching it at Christmas. 🤷‍♀️ Additionally, this quote has nothing to do with Christmas. It just cracks me up. 😅

Joe: The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or who on earth they are can — for only $2.95 — get not just a cup of coffee, but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!

The Platinum Preppy nib did really well here. But it’s also possible that the long blade nib might’ve done okay since it’s Midori paper instead of Tomoe River. Who knows? I did prefer writing with an actual pen for the quote this time, though. I use the dip pen for these projects for ease of cleaning, but it’s not the best experience for writing more than a line or two, especially when using a shimmer.

These brown inks keep surprising me by how much I like them. I guess this is kind of on the cooler side of brown, despite the underlying red tone, so that could be a factor. The shading is nice, even out of a finer nib, like the Preppy’s 03 nib.