Ink Swatch Wednesday: Birmingham Pen Co Megalodon

I wanted to order a full bottle of Birmingham Pen Co's Lampshade ink, which I originally had a sample for and liked a lot. In the same order, I also ended up picking up Megalodon, an odd grayish brown color (yeah, yet another brown!), that I hadn't sampled before, and was taking a chance on. But I recently filled my TWSBI ECO with it and like its oddity a lot.

This is one of those inks that's hard to capture digitally because of its strange mix of shades of brown, gray, and some greenish undertones. This scan is pretty close, at least how it appears on my laptop's screen, thanks to some color adjustments in my scanning software. YMMV, thanks to differing screen calibrations and such. It's a fairly cool (temperature-wise) mix of brown and gray. Even though it's summer, I'm in the seasonal mood for pastel, dusty, dusky colors, and this neutral fits into my palette.

Because it's such a unique color, I don't really have any close matches from my ink library, but there are some inks that at least remind me of Megalodon, or have certain similar color components. Perhaps the two closest ones are Esterbrook Forgotten Iced Coffee and Jacques Herbin Cacao du Brésil:

Forgotten Iced Coffee leans warmer and is much less saturated, but it is essentially a grayish brown shade. Cacao du Brésil is closer, but in the swatch it appears warmer brown, lacking gray. However, in writing samples, I think Megalodon and CdB look closer.

Some other swatches that are further away on the gray-brown ink spectrum:

Jacques Herbin Gris Orage somewhat emulates the gray-browness of Megalodon through its medium gray base and gold shimmer. Kinda sorta.

Diamine Dusted Truffle looks way off, but in reality, at some angles, the silver shimmer makes its lighter brown base look cool enough to be a lighter, less saturated version of Megalodon (if you squint really hard 😆).

Robert Oster Motor Oil skews more greenish-brown to my eyes, with no gray in sight, and is way too saturated.

Anyway, yeah, if you like weird, hard-to-categorize inks, Birmingham Pen Co's Megalodon might be worth checking out. I'll definitely file it in my ink library along with all the other "odd" inks (lots of chromoshaders), happily. Let me know if you have any other weird ink recommendations!

P.S. If you like what I write about fountain pens and inks, you can see more under the fountain pens tag. Also, if you want to further support me, you can send a tip via Ko-Fi. I'd really appreciate it! This is a new thing for me to plug, so I appreciate you reading to the end. 🙂