When sorting through my ink collection the other day I was wondering about which colour family I seemed to prefer in my inks, and decided to count them up. And the results were quite surprising to me! 

My favourite colour is purple, followed by pink and green, and so I expected those to be the most popular colours in my ink collection. But that wasn’t necessarily the case! So here’s a quick rundown of my ink collection to date, starting from the colour family I have most inks in, to the least: 

Blue: 11

Purple: 9

Green: 8 

Black: 5

Brown: 4

Red: 3

Yellow: 3

Orange: 3

Pink: 3

Grey: 3

These results include both my bottled ink and cartridges, which explains why I have so many blacks: I have proprietary cartridges for a number of pen brands like Lamy and Parker. 

As I expected, I have lots of purple and green inks. But surprisingly I only have 3 pink inks, and blue beat out everything else with a total of 11 different inks. 

This is surprising, because on the whole I don’t love blue as an ink colour. Since a lot of ballpoint pens come with dark blue ink, and even fountain pens often come with a blue cartridge, it feels like a boring ink colour to me. And if I’m going boring, I’d prefer black ink. 

But I have recently started to appreciate the breadth and range of blue inks out there, and have been enjoying some lighter, brighter blues that are more in the turquoise spectrum, like Kaweco Paradise Blue and J. Herbin Bleu Calanque. 

Another surprise for me is that I only have 4 different brown inks. Brown isn’t a colour I generally love, but I feel like I’ve been really getting into brown inks recently, and so it was a surprise to find out I don’t actually have that many after all! I must have just found a few shades I really love – namely Octopus Fluids Karamell and Faber Castell Hazelnut – and have been sticking with them. 

There are also a few colours I feel like I don’t have many of that I’d like to add more of to my collection. Yellows, oranges and reds for example, as I feel like I’m lacking in the warmer colour department! I’m quite surprised I don’t have more reds, but yellows I feel are less surprising, as I’ve sometimes found the ones I have difficult to read because they’re too light. I’d love to find a deep, buttery yellow to add to my collection though! 

On the whole though, I feel like I have a nice range so far, and especially a lot of choice as far as my favourites green and purple go. I just need more pinks! 

So what colours do you have most of in your ink collection? Does it correspond with your favourite colour, or has it surprised you?