Tono & Lims Earth Contact Fluorite Daylight — 4ml Fountain Pen Ink Sample

Hue: Tono & Lims describe it as a pale base with similarly coloured glitter. On my Tomoe River swatches it reads as a soft dusty rose-brown: warm beige-pink in the writing sample, cooling to a greyish mauve-taupe under indirect light, and deepening to a proper cocoa brown where the ink pools. The one real divergence from the official description is the shimmer — it isn't "similarly coloured" at all, it's distinctly gold and contrasts with the base rather than matching it.

Shading: Present throughout. Light to moderate in normal writing; strong in swabs and pooled areas, running from pale beige at the thin edges to dark chocolate at the heavy ones.

Sheen: None.

Shimmer: Yes — fine gold, and generous with it. Understated in the writing sample, unmistakable in swabs and under direct light, where it flares to an olive-gold. Shake the vial before filling.

Flow: Medium.

The interesting bit: Fluorite is the mineral that gave fluorescence its name — the word was coined in 1852 after the way certain fluorite specimens glow. It's also the mineral collectors prize for showing up in almost every colour there is, and for looking like a different stone depending on the light you hold it in. Tono & Lims took that idea and ran a whole sub-set through it inside the Earth Contact Line — Daylight, Snow, Crystal, Marine, Indigo, Mint — one mineral, several moods. Daylight (catalogue number 026-5) is the warm one. Earth Contact is the brand's gems-and-minerals shimmer series; Tono & Lims themselves are a Japanese label founded by Takashi Ono, with the ink made in South Korea by Lim's Lab.

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.