I have to admit that I was bemused when I saw the name of Diamine’s Day 8 ink. It’s called Raspberry Rose, which I’ll admit, I first read as Raspberry Pie, which is why my testing sheets are labeled as such. Mistakes aside, the name matches the colour and Raspberry Rose is the colour of cooked-down raspberries, which I can’t pin down. I’m going to call it a magenta for the sake of this review, but I’m well aware that I could be wrong. That said, I was pretty excited to run this ink through my tests.
Despite not knowing what to call this colour, I do know that I like it. Raspberry Rose is a lush, dark colour, which makes it a really good writing ink. It shades nicely and the variation between dark purple and dark pink is very interesting. It’s a standard ink, which means there’s not much going on beyond what you see, but I don’t think there needs to be here. It’s an extremely nice colour. The one criticism that I would level at it is that it’s a bit close to last Calendar’s Mulled Wine. I don’t hold that against the ink itself, but it’s worth noting for the calendar overall.
I had a really good writing experience with this ink. It writes smoothly and consistently, with no ink flow issues, and I got really rich lines from it. I also didn’t get much feedback off the page. There was certainly some, but this is the closest I’ve gotten to having a pen glide on paper in a while. The ink itself is highly saturated, and I did have a lot of ghosting and some bleed-through. Nothing major, but more than usual.
The dry times on Raspberry Rose are on the long end of average, though the Leuchtturm paper is inflating that a bit. On Midori and Rhodia paper, I had no issues with the dry time, but I did smear some writing on the Leuchtturm. There’s not water resistance with this ink. It smears immediately on contact with water and my writing is washed out pretty quickly. In most cases, I wasn’t able to read what I had written after the water test.
Overall, I’m a big fan of this ink. Raspberry Rose is a lovely colour and a nice ink to be using. It does everything I want it to and didn’t give me any trouble, and I happen to like the colour. Based on the ink alone, I think I’d be willing to buy a bottle of it, were it ever available. Of course, there is one glaring issue: the similarity to Mulled Wine, but I think I’ll touch on that more after I’m through the calendar.
The Pen Lover's Nook 
I found this ink to display haloing too – an effect I’ve noticed in a couple of the Inkvent offerings and really quite interesting with a broader nib. I didn’t sample the 2019 calendar, but I’d agree with the rich wine-y comparison. I found it similar to Oster’s Syrah, as well as Diamine’s Writer’s Blood, and Pure Pens’ Cadwaladr (made by Diamine too).
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