(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
Since its release in 2016, Lamy Dark Lilac has been a beloved and highly sought-after ink. Aside from it being a beautiful shade of dark purple, it also had a bit of a slight gold sheen, which was quite uncommon at the time. Since it sold out pretty quickly, inkophiles have been begging, hoping, wishing, and praying for a re-release of the Lamy Dark Lilac ink and were shocked when they found it listed for sale on the German Lamy website. There had been no announcements made about the re-release of this ink, so people speculated that maybe it was a typo or maybe a tease of things to come?!? It also coincided with their annual release of limited edition Safaris, so maybe it was just being confused for Violet Blackberry? Turns out, it was a re-release of Lamy Dark Lilac, so everyone (including me) was excited to find out if it was the same formulation as the original 2016. TLDR/Spoiler Alert: it’s not the same because one of the ink components is no longer allowed .
There’ve been an abundance of posts and articles written about all of this, to the point that it made it to the New York Times (you need to be a NYT subscriber to read the full article.) Talk about mainstream news! If you’re interested in finding out more about this check out Aidan Bernal’s video as well as the series of #lamygate posts from FountainPenMemes starting with this one.
As a hoarder, I mean, owner of several bottles and cartridge packs of the original Lamy Dark Lilac (which I will refer to as OG or 2016), I was really curious to see how the two inks compared, so let’s dive right in!
I had originally swatched LDL 2016 around 2017/2018 when I had gotten the ink and decided to swatch it again, just to see if the color had changed (it hadn’t). I also swatched Violet Blackberry to see if it was close to either the old or new LDL. This review won’t include that ink.
All swatches were done on Col-O-Ring cards using a Kakimori steel dip nib and the non-brush end of a paintbrush, while writing samples were done with two TWSBI Go with Medium nibs and different Lamy’s with steel Medium nib. Both TWSBI Go pens are wetter than the Lamy’s, and the Lamy Dark Lilac Safari Medium nib writes drier than the Al-Star Lilac, I suspect that the black plated nib on the Safari is the reason why. Usually I just use the Endless Recorder with 68 gsm Tomoe River paper, but this time I included 52 gsm Tomoe River Paper (old) as well as 75 gsm Cosmo Air Light and 80 gsm Rhodia DotPad. Dry times may be a bit slower on 52gsm TR or with wetter nibs or faster on papers like Rhodia, copy paper, Cosmo Air Light or with drier or finer nibs.
You can really see the difference in the 2016 ink color with the drier Safari nib vs the wetter Go nib. The dry times were pretty fast with the Safari nib. Other than on the larger swatches, I was unable to get much, if any, gold sheen in my writing samples.
After all is said and done, is Lamy Dark Lilac 2024 better, worse, the same or as good as 2016? They aren’t the same but they are pretty close. I do like the pop of green sheen in 2024 which is a lot more visible than 2016’s gold sheen, but it’s almost (but not quite) too much sheen. Sheen aside, the base color (if you can get to it) is similar enough that I don’t think one needs to chase the OG version (unless you want to). Both inks behaved similarly with average flow and nice rich purple color so you can’t go wrong. The 2024 version did take a couple extra flushes with the syringe to get the Kakimori nib clean, so it might be a stainer, or at least take a little more time to clean out. Lamy’s inks are a bargain at $12 for a 50ml bottle and this new Dark Lilac is no exception. Like others, I think that Lamy should have renamed this to something else, or at least called it Dark Lilac 2.0, to avoid confusion. They seemed to have taken this all in stride, including poking fun at themselves in this recent IG post.
(Disclaimer: The original bottle of LDL from 2016, as well as the Lamy Safari, Dark Lilac, were purchased by me back in 2017. The 2024 LDL, the Violet Blackberry and the Lamy Al-Star Violet were all purchased from Vanness Pens; the pen was purchased at a discount at the Atlanta 2022 pen show.)