Monteverde - Moonstone

I am sticking with the few Monteverde gemstone inks I have and today it is Moonstone, hopefully I much better performer than Topaz, a review I abandoned. 
Moonstone is a sodium potassium aluminium silicate of the feldspar group.  Feldspars are minerals that crystallize from magma which is found beneath the earths surface, most would know magma as the molten material that spews from a volcano.  Moonstone has a pearly opalescent schiller, schiller is the result of thin microscopic inclusions in a translucent mineral that refracts and reflects incandescent light.

If believe stones have healing properties moonstone is said to contain the energy of the moon and as the moon represents Yin or feminine energy moonstone is said to promote healing, balance and enhancement of your intuition.  Moonstone has been used for jewellery for millenia, the Romans thought it was derived from solidified rays of the moon.  It became the Florida state gem in 1970 to commemorate the moon landings.
Based on the picture above and everything I know about Moonstone I was surprised to see a brown colour on the bottle.

Chromatography confirmed it is a blend of brown shades with a hint of bright blue, there is no pink at all.

Col-o-ring a chocolate brown that may shade.  Tomoe river a smokey looking brown.

I have a few brown inks and the closest colour match was a colorverse ink.

I used a Schaeffer pen for this review and as I inked it I prayed for a better performance than the topaz ink I reviewed previously.  I nearly gave up this review as I had abandoned Topaz.  This ink had such a hard start and I know it is not the pen.  In fact I was having so much trouble despite priming and shaking and priming and trying to write and priming I was almost beginning to believe I had been not been as meticulous about my pen cleaning as I thought and there was crud in the pen from a previous inking.  Then I refused to accept that three pens in a row were the problem and suddenly the ink flowed.  I like so many of the Monteverde ink colours I see online but they have to behave better than this.
I started with cheap cheap paper as this is what I was using while trying to get the ink to flow.  It is a brown ink, on cheap paper there is feathering and show through but it dries quite quickly.

Next up was Tomoe.  Here I described it as a dirty brown colour but the more I used it the more I like it and thought it would be a good work colour.  There was some shading.

The last test was Rhodia, no feathering, some shading and it dries to a dark brown.

I tend to like a little drama in my inks but that refers to colour not the amount of work required to get an ink to flow so I can write.  I am not sure why Monteverde called this moonstone it is a brown ink and fails to conjure up anything resembling moonstone. 
In summary –
Saturation – moderate
Shading – moderate
Sheen – no
Flow – good once it got going
Nib dry-out – no
Nib creep – none
Start-up – the hardest ink I have ever used, alongside Monteverde Topaz so I suspect it is a feature of Monteverde  inks
Feathering – yes on cheap paper
Drying – very quick on cheap paper, slow on Tomoe and a very respectable time on Rhodia – clearly depends on the paper
Cleaning – easy
Water resistance – I found this ink interesting – I held the swatch under a  running tap as I always do but unlike other inks I could see very very little run off the colour just faded as I watched.