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Even though KittyInkpot proves not to be a brand completely without local stockists overseas (Soe and Soe, for one, has some of the inks from Season I and now Season II as well, when I checked a moment ago), it's a small Chinese ink brand you have probably never heard about. The one mob (possibly with multiple storefronts) on AliExpress that bothers selling relatively little-known, but visually interesting ‘chromatography’ or ‘gradient’ multi-shading Chinese inks, has only just started listing a small number. Generally speaking, it's the sort of thing you'd have to set up an account on Taobao to buy, whether you're based in China or elsewhere; and then it wouldn't be worthwhile, for the non-trivial international shipping charges, to order just one or two colours to try. It requires some real ‘commitment’ to explore. This is one of the fourteen KittyInkpot colours I ordered. These are the official marketing images for it: The annotations state the paper used there was (produced on) Tomoegawa's “machine number 7”, the colours are pink and orange and blue-purple, and expressed thanks to the named user who offered the writing sample. As you can see, there is no English name for the ink on the bottle label, only the name of the “season” or collection of inks to which it belongs. That all looks lovely, but how does the ink render “in real life“? On Exacompta FAF 70g/m² paper, writing with it looks fairly dull: It's a bit more interesting on the 70g/m² paper in Maruman ‘Spiral Note’ books: but still it doesn't render as shades of pink and indigo the way the ink is shown in the marketing images.

For every full bottle (≥25ml) of ink I order, KittyInkpot throws in a 5ml bottle of ‘blind box’ ink, up to a maximum of six of the freebies per order. These inks are unidentified, and for all intents and purposes unidentifiable, as the assumption is that they are mostly inks not released as any colour available for retail ordering, possibly results of experimental mixes that did not make it into some ‘season’ or limited edition set of releases, so even if you look at the chromatogram of one of these mystery inks, chances are it matches nothing else you have seen or could produce from known KittyInkpot ink colours. This is how many I've collected so far. The numbering of those inks was my own doing, and arbitrary at that. If I'm going to have to reliably pinpoint a particular bottle, the generic 盲盒 labels the bottles came with won't help. I'm not about to make my own ‘informative’ bottle cap labels by swatching the ink in each bottle on round white labels, even though I have those; and it is not inconceivable that some bottles in my collection will contain identical inks. I have some sheets of preprinted, water-repellant, round number labels (running from 1 to 100 on each new sheet) from which numbers 1 to 24 have already been taken when I packed several ink advent calendar sets last year, and so I may as well make use of what is left on the used sheets, when there aren't many other applications that meaningfully or conventionally begin enumerating from 25 or 30 or 66. For this particular thing, the number itself has no significance other than being a unique marker or identifier. I started numbering the small bottles from 40 sequentially, and even so, I'm close to running out of numbers! I suppose I could have started from 30, but I wanted to keep a long enough run of consecutive smaller numbers for the 25ml bottles. I still don't know what I'm going to do with all that. For now, all the small bottles still fit inside the small cardboard box in which my Sailor leather 5-pen case came. As much as I find no joy in swatching inks, I may just have to do that for at least all 52 inks (which may or may not contain duplicates) in the small bottles, if not also the six larger ones, then post photos of the swatches (and perhaps writing samples, although those will be far less useful than someone may imagine) and see if anybody in my local, ‘private’ Facebook group of hobbyists want to buy individual bottles from me, once ⑴ they have seen how each one looks, and ⑵ they know it's not something they can just order from KittyInkpot or some other source when they're ready, but must treat it as a one-off (even though no doubt someone else somewhere in the world will unknowingly have a small amount of a particular ink in my ‘collection’. I'll also just pack the swatch cards and writing samples into the shallow space in the box that is above the bottle caps, and bring that to me to local monthly meets, to see anyone there wants to buy this bottle or that one having seen the swatch first-hand, and without having to pay for shipping as part and parcel of the transaction. Sharing that as a ‘free’ resource for interested parties to either put into their fountain pens, or add to their swatch books (or card decks, or any other physical form of cataloguing) because they have an almost separate hobby out of swatching inks, is not on the cards however, for now.