But no one expected Lamy to rerelease Dark Lilac — that is, until last month, when a few European retailers began selling an ink called, wait for it, Dark Lilac.
“Everyone was freaking out,” Mr. Bernal said.
Adding to the confusion: Lamy had already unveiled a new ink for 2024 called Violet Blackberry, which many assumed was a homage to Dark Lilac.
Something, though, was amiss. The lucky few who got their hands on the new Dark Lilac were dismayed that, once they put pen to paper, the ink was not quite the same as the original. The base color, according to an early YouTube review, was neither as blue nor as rich. The sheen was green instead of gold. And it definitely was not Violet Blackberry.
“Was it an error in translation? Some new-old stock that someone found in a back room? A reproduction? A mistake?” Mike Matteson, a philosophy instructor from Greensboro, N.C., who goes by Inkdependence on his social media channels, said in an interview. “There wasn’t a press release or any teasing of the product, and so no one really knew what was going on.”
Enthusiasts opened investigations. Among them was a man who runs an Instagram account called Fountain Pen Memes. The man, who declined to be identified, citing a government job in Brazil, posted an interaction he claimed to have had last week with a Lamy executive, in which the executive said the new Dark Lilac was identical to the old ink. In a subsequent post, the account shared an interaction with a different Lamy official in which the company retracted that statement, acknowledging the ink was different.
The man behind Fountain Pen Memes said he believed the company was unaware of the ink’s immense popularity.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
