Ink Review: Levenger Fireball

This has been the most difficult to photograph of all the reviews I have done. In the pictures (and I've taken many many pictures using different camera settings, lighting, etc.), Fireball comes off as a bright orange. And, while Fireball is orangy, it is much deeper and more saturated, so that at first and second glance it is a conservative red ink. As a friend put it, it looks like a weathered red, or a hot ember minus the glow.

Not wanting to scrap the review altogether, I have decided to post the pictures with the above comment. And, at the end, I have placed a color corrected photo, which although still not perfect, is a more accurate representation of the color in Levenger Fireball. Now, without further ado, the review:

Click for a larger, higher quality image.

I really put the steel toed boots to Fireball for this review. While I gave it the smoothest of roads to drive on, I gave it one of the poorest vehicles in my collection, a Parker 15 "Jotter." The Jotter has a tendency to thin my inks, leaving them shadows of their bottled selves. It also scratches from time to time. But, Fireball managed to rise to the occasion.


The name "fireball" for this ink is a bit of a misnomer. While the color is indeed a red-orange, I wouldn't say that it's the brightest of inks, hence why I called it a "conservative red." Aside from that, however, I found Fireball to be a very nice ink. It's well behaved in even my most troublesome fountain pen and has complex color.


Fireball flowed very consistently from my nib, writing well in a pen that has a tendency to thin my inks. As a result, however, there was a tiny bit of feathering on even the nicest of papers, in this review Clairefontaine 90 g. However, the feathering could be the result of the nib, which, as I mentioned before, can be scratchy at times.

I offer you my most sincere apologies for the inaccurate color representations in the above photographs. I have employed some very basic color correction on the below photo to offer a more accurate representation of Fireball. For what it's worth, however, you can take from my troubles that Fireball really is a complex color.


NOTE: I just found out that some time this year, Levenger discontinued Fireball ink. I got this bottle on the sale counter at the Levenger store in McLean, Virginia... there were none left. If you find a cache of it somewhere, please leave a comment to this post letting readers know where to pick it up.