Sailor Manyo Yomogi - 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: A saturated peacock teal — blue-leaning, with green sitting underneath rather than on top. Sailor and most describe it as teal or turquoise.  My swatches read bluer and deeper than "turquoise" implies, closer to peacock, and they don't show the green cast some reviewers report from large swabs on Tomoe River. Written out with a dip nib it stays firmly in the blue-teal range.

Shading: Medium. Visible in the writing sample as tonal shifts at stroke ends and along the swab bar, without tipping into high contrast.

Sheen: Yes, and it's the ink's best trick. Red-purple sheen wherever ink pools — on my swatches it comes up as a deep magenta-to-aubergine edge around the swabs and drops, darker and more purple than the pink or cinnamon-red some reviews describe. It needs pooling and the right light; you won't see it in a fine nib on absorbent paper.

Shimmer: None.

Flow: Medium.

The interesting bit: Yomogi is Japanese mugwort — the leafy green herb used in kusamochi and yomogi tea, and in moxibustion. Which makes the colour a genuine puzzle, because the ink is a blue-green teal with nothing herbal-green about it, and reviewers have been shrugging at the mismatch since launch. The series takes its name from the Man'yōshū, the "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves", Japan's oldest poetry anthology (c.759) — 4,516 poems by everyone from emperors to farmers, around 1,500 of which mention plants. Yomogi was one of the original eight colours in the first Manyo release, which went to the international market in November 2019 rather than Japan.

This is a hand-decanted 4ml sample vial from my own bottle.

Photos are my own swatches on Tomoe River Paper.

I'm a collector and I'm always happy to talk ink, so please message me if you have any questions.