Inktastic - De Atramentis Rote Rosen

Discovering a new ink brand is always exciting, especially when the ink smells like roses! 

At first, I was really excited about the perfume, it was immediately noticeable when I opened the bottle. And I must admit that it actually smells quite good, like actual roses, not some synthetic rubbish! But as soon as the ink had dried on the paper, the scent faded away, and so did my original enthousiasm fade as well...

So yeah, scents in inks, pretty gimmicky if you ask me. It doesn't make sense! What's the point of having ink that smells great from the bottle -even my pen smelled great when writing- but smells like any other ink (read: smells like nothing at all!) when it has dried? Conclusion: no, it won't make your love letters smell like roses!

Luckily Rote rosen (literally translated: red roses) has some other qualities besides smelling good. The colour is very nice, it's a pink-ish, almost magenta shade, much darker than I expected at first, but I really like it! It also has very decent shading, so overall it doesn't appear as dark as it actually is.

I was also really surprised by the performance of this ink, it is incredibly smooth! I would consider it on par with my Iroshizuko ink. (Yes that's quite good!) I expected the flow to be mediochre, as it is a red-ish ink (All other red inks I own have quite average flow), but this too was much better than expected, and I never experienced any skipping or hard starts with this ink in my TWSBI Mini! 

The dry-time isn't the fastest, but knowing how beautiful it is when it has dried, I can live with that!

The price is on the higher side, at 13 Euros for a 30ml bottle, but I'll give it some credit because it looks great and is such a joy to use (And it will make your pens smell like roses!). As said, the scented properties are not really noteworthy, as you won't notice it anymore when the ink has dried. But all things considered I still think this is one of the prettiest and best performing inks I currently own!