Lanbitou (heat/friction) erasable blue ink

[A Smug Dill]

 

It works. I haven't tried the equivalent blue ink from Ostrich, but I'll say this both seems and feels nicer to use than the Ostrich black erasable ink I've tried.

[Lithium466]

Cool ink, thank you for the overview and test!

Now, is this a pigment ink, and will it fade at ambiant temperature? Can the writing be "revived" by cooling the sheet?

[A Smug Dill]

1 hour ago, Lithium466 said:

is this a pigment ink,

 

Good question. I didn't think to look into that at all, but I've since tested the ink for waterproofness, and writing (on Rhodia dotPad paper) done with it is almost perfectly waterproof as far as I could see, even in just five minutes after being put on the page. So, I suspect this is indeed a pigment ink.

 

1 hour ago, Lithium466 said:

and will it fade at ambiant temperature?

 

Ambient temperature is not an objective and/or specific range, so I can't answer that. The temperature on/in/around a rack of computers servers could get quite hot if not actively managed, without somehow excluding that high range of temperatures from the semantic meaning of ‘ambient temperature’.

 

I don't have a test chamber or test equipment for applying monitored and controlled heating, to observe at what temperature the ink marks will begin to fade.

 

1 hour ago, Lithium466 said:

Can the writing be "revived" by cooling the sheet?

 

Partially.

[LizEF]

58 minutes ago, A Smug Dill said:

Ambient temperature is not an objective and/or specific range, so I can't answer that.

I don't remember the exact phrasing, but when I work for a microbiology lab, the SOPs defined room temperature (or something like that) as 20-25 C. In other words, anything just sitting around in the lab, not in an incubator, fridge, freezer, etc., was considered to be stored at 20-25 C. FWIW.

[A Smug Dill]

9 minutes ago, LizEF said:

In other words, anything just sitting around in the lab, not in an incubator, fridge, freezer, etc., was considered to be stored at 20-25 C. FWIW.

 

If the ink in the bottle hasn't faded from being stored at uncontrolled room temperatures, then the writing done with the ink isn't going to fade at that range of temperatures either. FWIW, I used a sheet of paper towel to mop up some spilled droplets, then used a hair dryer on the spots on the paper towel, and still it took a while for them to begin to fade.

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, A Smug Dill said:

If the ink in the bottle hasn't faded from being stored at uncontrolled room temperatures, then the writing done with the ink isn't going to fade at that range of temperatures either.

This seems a reasonable conclusion.  We've learned of late that there's a chemical reaction going on between ink and paper, impacting color and dry time at the least. UV might make a difference, but I'm reasonably sure ink-makers design the ink to be stable both in the bottle and on the page under "normal" conditions (and they or someone probably have various ranges used to define "normal").

 

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the ink makers to do the impossible and come up with the ink (or ink + pen) equivalent of a mood ring.   (I mean, what else is left?)

[inkstainedruth]

I don't know if I should be amused or frightened by the concept of "mood ring" ink....  

Of course, I tried a mood ring once but it didn't work so well for me, I'm generally ALWAYS feeling cold, unless I'm actually sick, so it didn't change color for me at all....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[A Smug Dill]

5 hours ago, LizEF said:

UV might make a difference,

 

I've already tried hitting the pages with UV-C light from a handheld sterilisation lamp, and also UV light from a nail lamp. Obviously neither will deliver a dose equivalent to prolonged exposure over months, but let's just say UV won't immediately cause fading (to any noticeable degree) of those ink marks either.

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, A Smug Dill said:

I've already tried hitting the pages with UV-C light from a handheld sterilisation lamp, and also UV light from a nail lamp. Obviously neither will deliver a dose equivalent to prolonged exposure over months, but let's just say UV won't immediately cause fading (to any noticeable degree) of those ink marks either.

[PJohnP]

Has anyone tried putting the "erased" materials into the freezer to see if they more-or-less reappear ?

 

I've used the Frixion pens, highlighters, and coloured markers for years to mark-up drawings and other documents with great success.  Errors in my mark-ups or other activities have been immediately addressed with the attached Frixion erasers.  Where errors in mark-ups or other edits over previous decades required "fresh" copies to address my mistakes, using the Frixion pens et al have been smooth and seamless.  The Frixion highlighter product has become a widely admired item when I travel to client sites, and I've had to "donate" many sets of the highlighters over recent years.

 

The review seems to indicate some partial erasability.  My experiences over a number of years with the Frixion pens et al have been something on the order of 99% erasability.  But the Frixion ink requires some substantial frictional application with the supplied erasers - hence, I assume, the origin of the trade name.  I'd be curious about the degree of "elbow grease" applied for the tests.

 

Unsurprisingly, I'm keenly interested to now more about this new Lanbitou ink and its availability in the US.  I see it on AliExpress, but for a variety of reasons related to international commerce, that's not as appealing a vendor as it was previously.

 

 

 

John P.

[AmandaW]

I use Frixion markers on fabrics as a sewing aid, then remove with the heat of the iron as a finishing step. I don't recall anything ever reappearing.

[A Smug Dill]

3 hours ago, PJohnP said:

Has anyone tried putting the "erased" materials into the freezer to see if they more-or-less reappear ?

 

Yes; and thus I answered @Lithium466 earlier in this thread with, “partially.”

 

4 hours ago, PJohnP said:

The review seems to indicate some partial erasability.  My experiences over a number of years with the Frixion pens et al have been something on the order of 99% erasability.

 

I hadn't intended on this to be an ink review (and I've published over forty ink reviews on FPN). It was a simple, one-page experiment, to show one aspect of the ink only. I hadn't even thought to consider whether this is a pigment ink or something else, until @Lithium466 asked; and I didn't plan on testing its water resistance, expect as a first step towards decided whether it's a pigment ink, considering that the manufacturer didn't say, and I don't have a microscope for inspecting the this ink fresh from the bottle smeared on a glass slide.

 

The colour will disappear entirely from the ink traces completely whey they're heated at high enough temperatures and for long enough (even without damaging the substrate); the part where I've pressed heated metal stamps against the paper surface (albeit too hard, because I had something somewhat soft under the sheet to act as insulation from the ‘workbench’ surface) shows that. That does not mean the naked eye, let alone a well-focussed camera, cannot detect the ink traces; they merely ‘changed colour’ to transparent, while still at least partially sitting on top of the paper surface.

 

Even so, in my opinion it qualifies as the shaped ink marks on the page, and the information content they represent, as having been erased. Nobody questions whether pencil markings have been erased if there is no more colour to be seen, even if the (visually detectable) indentations the tip of the pencil made on the paper easily reveal the information content to those who are keen to discover or recover it.

 

4 hours ago, PJohnP said:

I'd be curious about the degree of "elbow grease" applied for the tests.

 

Just enough to see the colour disappear to a degree such that a photo showing the results would be meaningful in establishing whether the ink marks are friction-erasable (in a yes-or-no kinda way), not how completely and certainly not how well it will meet the requirements of some other user (than myself) and/or some particular use case.

 

[yazeh]

Interesting concept. Though I fail to see the utility in my case nowadays.  As a student (eons ago) I was one of the few who used fountain pen. I had an eraser/gel pen to wipe out mistakes and rewrite with a similar blue ink. Others used Tipp-ex (correction fluid) which we had to wait until dry, to rewrite upon. I don't know if students still write by hand, though I don't see them walking with a heat-gun during an exam. But the frixion eraser looks neat.  

[PJohnP]

15 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

Yes; and thus I answered @Lithium466 earlier in this thread with, “partially.”

...

 

Even so, in my opinion it qualifies as the shaped ink marks on the page, and the information content they represent, as having been erased. Nobody questions whether pencil markings have been erased if there is no more colour to be seen, even if the (visually detectable) indentations the tip of the pencil made on the paper easily reveal the information content to those who are keen to discover or recover it.

 

 

Thank you.

 

My question was specific to using freezer temperatures, as that's what's really needed to mostly recover erased Frixion materials.  Cooling the pages, say being left in the car overnight, can be less reliable.  Indentations from the pen are, of course, another matter, and so I didn't raise that issue.

 

The ink sounds most promising.

 

 

 

John P.

[A Smug Dill]

On 1/17/2026 at 11:01 PM, Lithium466 said:

will it fade at ambiant temperature?

 

1 hour ago, PJohnP said:

My question was specific to using freezer temperatures,

 

Here's the thing. I don't have the means (or the motivation to acquire or access them) to discover and record at which temperatures the colourant(s) in the ink would do what, and I didn't set out to look how well relatable the ink's behaviour is to the writing fluid in Pilot FriXion pens (with which others are apparently and understandably more familiar), or whether it would fit the requirements of someone else's use case(s), much less how to procedurally achieve the desired results down to specific performance aspects.

 

The geeky part of me would like to be able to know those objective parameters; but, for the purpose of this decidedly simple piece of show-and-tell, they would be well beyond the scope. The ink is marketed as being erasable by heat and by friction, so I've briefly tested both of those approaches to validate the claim.

 

I stated what I did, on various parts of the image, so that my results shown could be reproducible or falsifiable for those who are interested in looking at the product further. I don't know the temperature to heat gun (I used, which only has one setting), didn't record how far I held it from the paper surface, or how long it took (but it was less than a second) to produce the ‘partially’ erased results shown for that particular part of the experiment. I didn't make any conscious assessment of how much friction or how much effort it took for some of the other aspects of the experiment.

 

None of those finer details mattered to me, or my design of the experiment; and many of my replies in this thread just end up being the long way of stating my position of, “I didn't care about that,” and that I don't see what I've presented as falling short of what I wanted to show and share with other prospective users in the community, perhaps as a starting point for them to decide whether to expend personal funds and effort to find out more.

 

1 hour ago, PJohnP said:

Cooling the pages, say being left in the car overnight, can be less reliable.

 

I live in the heart of Sydney, where the temperature rarely falls below 7°C even in the coldest of winter nights, so for me leaving the sheet of paper in the car would reliably do nothing to restore any colour to the erased content. 😆