First of all MERRY CHRISTMAS ^_^.  I hope you all have had your pen wishes come true!  I try to keep the pen mail rolling all year so I didn’t really choose one special thing for today.  Now to the review!

Of course one of the unicorn inks that I ordered had to be pink!  However, despite the pink label on the box, the ink turned out not to be pink.  This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it also produced an interesting mystery for me!  So lets get started.

Unicorn Ink Reviews:

  1. Pilot Iroshizuku Edo-Murasaki
  2. Maruzen Athena Eternal Blue
  3. Kingdom Note Thysanostoma Thysanura
  4. XXXXX
  5. XXXXX

The ink itself comes in a Sailor Ink box with a Kingdom Note label stuck on it, I think they could have done a better job with the packaging but I can usually forgive that if the color is amazing.  You can even see the original wording under the label.


The bottle is the standard Sailor bottle with a Kingdom Note label stuck on.  Similar to how Bungbox labels are.  They come off easily and have a very makeshift feel.


Now for the good part the ink.  The ink felt very….VERY familiar!  I did not intend for this review to be a contrast but the similarities were too striking to ignore.  But first let’s focus on this ink.

For this review I inked up my Pelikan M600 M Nib, it is a generally wet, consistent writer.

I did the standard Ink Journal entry:

This color is not a pink like the label on the outside would have suggested, but a Bungbox L’Amant like purple.  The ink has a very nice flow, a very dramatic shading, and a light silver sheen.  If the color hadn’t been so similar I would probably have recommended the ink etc and let it end there.  But lets dig deeper into the similarities.


This is my original Ink Journal Entry for L’Amant in comparison to the one I just did for this KN Jellyfish Ink.


If that isn’t enough to be convincing, how about this?  Can you tell which words go with which ink?


First comparison photo in HDR and the other in natural light.


It is worth noting that the L’Amant ink looks like it shows slightly more sheen than the KN, however this may be attributed to the use of a different pen.  To me it almost seems like this KN ink is repackaged L’Amant or vice versa.  Perhaps the formula for KN is just L’Amant with slightly more water content?  This may explain how the L’Amant has more sheen and also just slightly more shading.  When I do the L’s it seems like L’Amant has more of a gradient effect whereas the KN ink is pretty flat until the end.

In normal writing though they are basically identical.  This ink cost me $24.00 on eBay with shipping, whereas L’Amant was $43.00 shipped.  Is it worth almost double the cost for a marginal amount more sheen?  Probably not.  I’m not a scientist so I can’t prove the formulas are the same, but they seem pretty similar to me.  If this is the case I might buy a replacement bottle of KN when I run out of these rather than spend the extra money for a Bungbox bottle.  That being said the KN ink is not as readily available, so I may not have a choice, but if the choice does present itself for the value the KN wins.

What are your thoughts?  Do you think these colors could be cut from the same cloth so to speak?

I leave you with a picture of these amazing chicken dumplings from Christmas Eve dinner ^_^