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Jacques Herbin – Iris Sagesse Ink Review # 229 --- 🧾 Description This ink is part of a new series available in 10 and 30 ml bottles. It appears that newer bottles in the classic line are now labelled “Jacques Herbin.” This ink is just gorgeous. With dry pens like a Lamy, it writes a pinkish colour and dries into a lovely spring iris blurple. The writing experience is out of this world, especially after reviewing several inks lacking in the lubrication department. It made most of my nibs sing. The ink can stain transparent sections and it’s a pain to clean. I needed a cleaning solution. Despite that, I really enjoyed writing, sketching, and drawing with it. --- 🧪 Chroma --- ✍️ Writing Samples (scan) Quotes: “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” Albert Camus, (1913–1960) — philosopher, novelist “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Jean Giono (1895–1970) — novelist “The beauty of a flower lies in its fragility.” Paul Valéry (1871–1945) — poet, essayist “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” Paul Valéry (1871–1945) — poet, essayist “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) — philosopher, essayist Rhodia / Iroful Midori /Tomoe River 68gsm Note: Tomoe River used here is 68 gsm, not the thinner 52 gsm version commonly referenced in reviews. Hammermill 20lb 📸 Photo Rhodia/ Iroful Midori / Tomoe River 68 gsm Hammermill 20 lb copy paper Closeup 🔍 Comparison Col-O-ring. Scans are approximative. --- 💧 Water Test --- 🎨 Artwork Too Much Sake in the Iris Garden! I copied and combined two different Japanese art forms with my cat & mouse theme. Jacques Herbin Iris Sagesse (purple), Gris Galet (grey), and Vert Forêt (green), Octopus WD Bunny Orange, Uniball Signo White gel pen, Fabriano watercolor paper. Dreaming of Spring I used a mix of water colour and ink with my Cat & Mouse theme. Watercolour, mauve and yellow, Inks: Jacques Herbin Iris Sagesse, Vert Fôret, Girs Galet, Sailor Shikiori Sasabune, Tintenlabor Lärchengold, Fabriano watercolour paper. Iris Miniature: A play of words with iris. Ackerman fountain pen with Leonardt Principal nib, Diamine Grey, Jacques Herbin Iris Sagesse, Bleu Azur, Talens Mixed Media Square Sketchbook. Inktober Prompt 8: Pretend Cat & Mouse love to pretend they are heroes from a different time & age. Inspired by an 18th century painting. Ackerman fountain pen fitted with Leonardt Principal EF nib. Jacques Herbin Iris Sagesse (purple), Inkebara Sand (golden tan), Fanyantan Sakura Blizzard (murky tan), Diamine Grey. --- - Pens Used: Pilot Kakuno EF, Lamy (EF/F/M/B/ Stub 1.1), Hongdian Forrest Blade nib, Noodler’s Nib Creaper with Waterman W2 nib - What I Liked: Lubrication, Lovely colour. - What I Did Not Like: Lack of water resistance. Cleaning. - Writing Experience: Cushiony, pillowy. - Pros: Beautiful rich colour, lubrication. Price, small bottles. - Cons: Can stain and needs cleaning solution. 🧷 Ink Characteristics - Shading: Subtle. - Ghosting: Faint - Bleed Through: A bit on copy paper. - Flow Rate: Wet. - Lubrication: Out of this world. - Nib Dry-out: No. - Start-up: No. - Saturation: Gorgeous. - Sheen: No. - Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Did not notice. - Nib Creep / Crud: Did not notice. - Staining (Pen): - Clogging: No. - Cleaning: A pain. Ok with a cleaning solution. - Water Resistance: No. --- 🛒 Availability - Available in 10/30 ml bottles worldwide. --- 💬 Closing I enjoyed using this ink despite its flaws. The lubrication and the vibrancy of the colour were a pleasure to use, and I was sorry to flush my pens. It’s for those who look for a vibrant purple. No fountain pens were hurt in preparing this review. Please don’t hesitate to share your experience, writing samples, or any other comments — the more the merrier.

J.Herbin – Iris Sagesse La Société Herbin, Maître Cirier à Paris, was established in 1670. This makes J. Herbin probably the oldest name among European ink makers. Today, Herbin produces a range of beautiful fountain pen and calligraphy inks, writing instruments, gift sets and accessories. Herbin inks are made in France, and the finishing touches on the bottles are still done by hand in Paris. In January 2025, five new J. Herbin inks were released in the Perle de Encres series. This Iris Sagesse is one of them. The others are Gris Galet, Rouge Amarante, Vert Cactus and Vert Forêt. The inks follow the tradition of their predecessors: well-made inks, that sell at an affordable price (about 10 euro for a 30 ml bottle). Of these five new inks, it was Iris Sagesse that immediately drew my eye, so this is the first one that gets to be reviewed. Iris Sagesse is an intriguing ink with a colour that effortlessly shifts from violet to blue and back again, depending on whatever magic makes the universe tick. Is it the light? The paper? The angle you look at it? The saturation? … I’ve been unable to pin it down. And I don’t care. Because what J. Herbin presents us with is a beautiful violet-blue ink that is a pleasure to use. Not only for writing, but also for more artistic uses. Definitely an ink with character! A word of warning is at its place here. As you might expect from my above description, Iris Sagesse’s colour is difficult to capture correctly. In scans, it looks too purple, in photos too blue. And to make matters worse, it also depends on your computer screen. The way I see it: violet-blue, with the blue dominating. But the violet tones will not be tamed, and sometimes unexpectedly take the front. It’s unnerving… you look at your writing and it’s definitely blue. Look away and back again, and you might think violet. Crazy! And lovely! Iris Sagesse has an intense colour with high saturation. It’s also a well-lubricated ink, that flows easily from pen to paper. A bit too lubricated maybe. With a wet pen, the ink flow is a bit too gushy, and a lot of ink is deposited on the page. As a result, you get little variation in your strokes - shading doesn't get a chance to surface and gets buried under too much ink. When you tame the ink flow, things become a lot more interesting. The violet-blue meanderings become more pronounced. Soft and subtle shading appears. As such, I prefer this ink in dry-writing pens, or in finer nibs, or with stub nibs that distribute the ink across a broader surface. A bit of experimentation is required to find the right pen/nib combination. The saturation sample below illustrates the point. The colour span of this ink is fairly narrow, with little difference between the areas of low and high saturation. As a result, any shading you’ll get will be subtle, and with wet pens – that live on the right side of the spectrum – shading will not be present. The water test shown at the end of this review reveals an ink that hates water. It smudges easily, and cannot survive watery accidents. With care, you might be able to reconstruct your writing – but that will need some detective work. When reading the chromatography, this is to be expected. Some ink remains attached to the paper, but the dyes spread out easily, creating a coloured mess that drowns out the original text. Too bad. It makes this ink unsuitable for the workplace. Being a saturated and highly lubricated wet-flowing ink, I was surprised by the really fast drying times of Iris Sagesse. Om most papers, the ink dries in the 5-10 second range with my Lamy Safari M-nib pen, which is quite short. And dry times remain consistent across paper types, even on the very smooth Japanese papers. And Iris Sagesse has another surprise up its sleeve. When writing with the ink, it looks more of a violet-purple, that dries quickly to a violet-blue. It makes writing with this ink all the more interesting. I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. On each scrap of paper I show you: An ink swab, made with a cotton Q-tip 1-2-3 pass swab, to show increasing saturation An ink scribble made with a Lamy Safari M-nib fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a Lamy Safari B-nib A small text sample, written with Lamy Safari M-nib Source of the quote, written with Pelikan M120 M-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) Iris Sagesse looks great on both white and cream paper. It also handles lower quality paper well, with only the tiniest amount of feathering on Moleskine. But expect a lot of show-through and bleed-through on the cheaper paper. The Pelikan M120 pen I used for the quote sources is a wet writer. It clearly shows that with such a pen, the shading doesn’t get the opportunity to surface. It’s just blown away by the ink’s saturation. The writing samples above are shown as photos. They are close to reality, but still a bit too blue-looking on my laptop screen. Below I also present a scan of some writing samples – this one looks too purple on my screen. Reality lives somewhere in between. Below you can find some enlarged details of writing samples. These illustrate the soft and subtle shading you can expect from Iris Sagesse. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. All samples were written with a Lamy Safari, which is typically a dry pen and as such brings out the best out of this ink. The Gazing Far and Pelikan visiting pens are wet writers – they lose much of the shading, and show more blue that violet tones. The M-stub Sailor pen looks great and definitely suits this ink best: nice shading, and it really shows off that violet-blue character of Iris Sagesse. Related inks To compare J. Herbin Iris Sagesse with related inks, I use my nine-grid format with the currently reviewed ink at the center. This format shows the name of related inks, a saturation sample, a 1-2-3 swab and a water resistance test – all in a very compact format. I’ve also put Iris Sagesse between it’s cousins Éclat de Saphir and Violette Pensée. The resemblance with Éclat de Saphir is striking. But it also clearly shows that violet undertone shimmering through with Iris Sagesse. Inkxperiment – Science Matters : Newton As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. I find this to be a fun extension of the hobby, and these single-ink drawings often present a real challenge. It also gives you an idea of what the ink is capable of in a more artistic setting. While browsing on Wikipedia, I came across an article on cross-writing. This is a writing technique where you write on the page both horizontally and vertically. This was done in the early days of the postal system in the 19th century to save on expensive postage charges, as well as to save paper. Unexpectedly, it’s still fairly easy to read the lines. And it is extremely cool to look at! This drawing is the second one in a series inspired by this technique. The violet-blue nature of Iris Sagesse made me think of the sky and by extension the cosmos, with its stars and planets drawing their orbits, governed by the laws of gravity. It should come as no surprise that I selected Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” for the text in the background of the drawing. I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper, and used a dishwashing sponge to draw the blue backdrop. I then used a plastic card dipped in ink to paint the horizontal lines, and a triangular stamp with pure ink to create the triangle shapes. I then used a fine-nibbed pen and copied the text from Newton’s work, employing the cross-writing technique. To finish the drawing I added some splatters of ink, and stamped in some square motifs. The final drawing illustrates what can be achieved with this J. Herbin ink in a more artistic setting. Inkxpired – computational art I love experimenting with pen/ink/paper, and have added another layer as part of the hobby. I’m exploring computational art, inspired by the ink drawings I do during ink reviews. Another fun offshoot of the hobby… and all that starting with a few drops of dye-coloured water on paper. I started by applying a sketch-art filter that abstracted the drawing, and followed up with a tiny-world filter. I then rotated the picture a bit and did a cut-out. The resulting drawing shows an abstracted view of our solar system, with the planets locked in their orbits, obeying the laws of physics written down in Newton’s seminal work. Conclusion J. Herbin Iris Sagesse is an intriguing ink with a hard-to-define colour that fluctuates between violet and blue. This ink thrives in dry writers, and opens up in broad stubs – in these circumstances, the violet undertones surface easily, and the ink’s subtle and soft shading enhances its aesthetics. Another fine ink from the Perle des Encres series, and one that I greatly enjoy. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types A few extras Iris Sagesse’s colour is difficult to capture. Below you’ll find a photo of a photo. On the computer screen: left side shows a scanned image, right side a photo image. And in front of them the same subject. My impression: the images on the computer screen are either too purple or too blue, with the truth in between. While creating the inkxperiment drawing, I used a small piece of photo paper to test saturation of water/ink combinations. I liked the resulting pattern, so instead of throwing it away, I did a quick doodle that turned out just fine. Saved from oblivion 😉