Diamine Shimmertastic - Cocoa Shimmer

Cocoa shimmer is the second shimmer ink I ever purchased.  It is much more muted than many of the other shimmer inks, the gold shimmer with a brown ink is quite subtle even in bright light.  Diamine inks are ubiquitous however I am going to recommend you buy directly from Diamine if you are interested.  Obviously, they carry the whole range, I bought 5 shimmer inks, paid the UK price which is less than I would pay in New Zealand and only five pounds for postage (NZD$10, USD$6.25).

Cocoa (cocoa bean, cacao or cacao bean) is the dried and fermented seed of Theobroma cacao from which cocoa butter and cocoa solids are extracted.  The beans are the basis of chocolate and many Mesoamerican foods.

The term cocoa also means
- the drink that also is commonly called hot chocolate 
- the dry powder made by grinding cocoa seeds and removing the cocoa butter from the cocoa  
   solids
- a mixture of cocoa powder and cocoa butter  
The cocoa tree is native to the Amazon basin but now approximately 70% of the worlds crop is found in West Africa.

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​The ink comes in 50ml glass bottles with a cap that indicates the colour of the shimmer, here gold cap = gold shimmer. The bottles are different to the usual squat Diamine 80ml bottles or small plastic 30ml bottles.  As they are clear you also get a good idea of the ink colour.

Chromatography was interesting in that there was no obvious brown, more a mix of pink, orange a murky grey colour and the gold shimmer.

On col-o-ring it is a chocolate brown, you have to move the swatch around to appreciate the shimmer but it is not as intense as the previous shimmer inks I have reviewed e.g. firefly.  

On Tomoe the brown ink was more brick coloured and again it took moving the swatch around to appreciate the shimmer.

As with previous shimmer ink reviews I have used a TWSBI go.  The papers are copy, Rhodia and Tomoe.
With writing on copy paper it is a nice brown, shimmer is not that obvious and it dries quite quickly.  There was no feathering and no bleed through.

On Rhodia the dry time was even more impressive but again shimmer not so obvious.  As you can see I had problems with the pen clogging – I have never had this issue with a shimmer ink before but I think it may also be partly due to me leaving the pen lying for too long.

I gave the pen a really good shake for the Tomoe and things started well so I thought it was the pen and then it started to skip again.

The shimmer is subtle and the ink is a nice brown colour so it is more useful than some of the brighter shimmer inks.  Diamine inks are very good inks, they have a large range, are well priced and are 99.9% of the time excellent performing inks.   
In summary -
Saturation - high
Shading - no
Sheen – no
Shimmer - gold
Flow – initially good but then flow problems – you need to keep the ink well mixed so the shimmer doesn’t settle
Nib dry-out - none
Nib creep - none
Start-up – Excellent but see comments above about flow
Feathering - no
Drying – very good, quick on Rhodia
Cleaning - good
Water resistance - not sold as waterproof because it really isn't.