It took a while but I finally cleaned the space around my ink shelf and and arranged the bottles somewhat to take a photo of the entire collection. The title is a bit untrue because as of these photos, 619 bottles of ink were on the shelf (well, one I forgot was on my desk) but I have 18 bottles of ink that are on the way as well making for a total of 637 bottles (593 if you discount the 44 duplicated). That's around 33.47 litres (8.84 gallons) of ink. I have an additional 99 samples and swatches of 165 inks that I have neither bottles nor samples of. In total I have 858 swatches of unique inks.
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Sheen vs Shimmer (and some good sheeners)
Back in 2015 Brian Goulet made a video and accompanying article about sheening inks. I love sheen, in fact it's a major deciding point on whether I grab an ink or not, so this should be something right up my alley, but it wasn't. The article conflated markedly differing ink characteristics, and made quite curious decisions of which inks were chosen to exemplify the topic. He also left a number of very sheening inks off the list that Goulet Pens carry - ignoring the many sheening inks that they don't carry - such as Diamine Bilberry).
The main issue with the article (I'll just talk about the article) is that in it Brian conflated sheen resulting from the ink and shimmer/glitter resulting from particles or pigments in the ink. Now I concede that there isn't a well established term for these 'shimmering' inks. There is and was, however, an established term for the shine resulting from the ink itself: sheen!
(Moving forward I will call them sheen and shimmer)
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