Good price, too!

Sheaffer Skrip Purple from Slovenia, sold in a bottle shaped like a section of a cone (the mouth is still fairly wide), is abbreviated SSPS in this review. The only purple or violet ink I can compare SSPS to is Waterman Purple/Violette, which is abbreviated WP in this review. These two inks, both purple, are rather different.

(Edit, 2/15/2006, 8:10 p.m. UTC: From my Lamy Safari Extra Fine and Medium pens,) SSPS flows easily, is bright when wet, dries very quickly and dries to what I'd call a dark shade of purple with much less of a hot-pink hue than WP. I am avoiding the words "blue-ish" and "blue-er" in this comparison because SSPS is purple beyond any doubt. I don't know which flowers, fruits or vegetables to compare either ink to.
(Edit, 2/15/2006, 8:10 p.m. UTC: Thanks to Ann Finley, I can now say that SSPS dries to lavender after being written from my Lamy pens.)

After drying, SSPS is much more pleasant to read than WP, from both a fine nib and a wider nib. I suppose you could say that WP is more vibrant or eye-catching than SSPS. Nonetheless, my eyes don't want to stay with WP very long after being caught, even when the line is very fine!. My eyes can stay comfortably with SSPS for a long time at any line width. These two inks serve very different purposes for me.

On the loose-fiber ("bad") paper I use for testing (see this topic for more discussion), SSPS behaves as well as the other inks I've recommended so far for this material.
SSPS behaves much better than WP! WP wicks itself aggressively out of a pen and onto and into loose-fiber paper, shadowing the other side heavily and sometimes bleeding through. SSPS wicks itself reasonably onto loose-fiber paper, shadowing only occasionally and not bleeding through at all. This is all true coming from a dry, fine nib, a medium-flow, fine nib and a medium-flow, medium-broad nib.

I'm now using Sheaffer Skrip Purple as my standard purple and putting Waterman Purple aside for special uses.

oooh! Not another purple ink to think of! :doh:

I agree that Sheaffer Slovenian Purple is a good purple and a good ink. It is VERY close in color to Herbin Violette Pensee (see my review of the latter for the color) and the two inks behave about the same. I use both. As a lefty, I must have the fast drying inks.

What I like best--and this is true of both the Slovenian Purple & Violette Pensee--is that they can show as a nice shade of lavender in a dryer writing pen and as a true purple in a wetter writer. I do not find this great of a color variation in the darker purples that I've tried, such as Diamine Purple or Waterman Purple.

Best, Ann

After reading Ann and Goodwhiskers' endorsement of this ink, I bought a bottle of this ink. It was cheap at the store I got it from and figured it wouldn't hurt to add some new colors to the rotation.

I hadn't liked the Slovenian version of Skrip Blue, so I was figured this ink would be lousy too. I was wrong. I've used it so far in a medium nib Core and fine-nib Wality 52 and it's worked great. Dries fast and is more of a bluish purple to my eyes. On the Ampad legal pads I usually write on, there's little to no bleed through.

This is an ink worth spending more time with.