(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
Anything that can add a little festivity to homework reading is a good investment, in my opinion. Faber-Castell are among my favorite highlighters, so I was very excited to try these metallic shimmering varieties.
Faber-Castell highlighter bodies are a unique shape with broad bodies in a flattened oval silhouette. They are surprisingly comfortable to hold, as the narrow end of the oval rests against your hand and you hold it along its broader edge. The flat shape stops it from rolling off of desks, and even allows it to function as a decent bookmark. The clips are also broad and very bendy plastic. They aren't very strong and don't hold many sheets of paper, but they're fine for clipping to a thin book cover or a few pages of reading. The snap cap posts securely to the narrowed end of the marker.
The highlighter's chisel tip creates a 5 mm highlight when used on the broad side, and a narrower line when you use the tip of the chisel, so it's handy for highlighting large and smaller text.
What really makes these highlighters unique, of course, is the shimmer ink. I've used glitter markers before, but never in highlighter form. I would say these are marginally successful at the glitter effect. The four colors in this set are Shimmering Violet, Magnificent Blue, Precious Green, and Glorious Red, all pastel versions of classic jewel tones. They're all a little different in how they handle the glitter. Green shows no sign of glitter, red shows a hint, blue has so much that it has a mirror effect that's hard to read in bright light, and violet has the perfect balance. Part of that will be in how the shimmer particles are distributed and suspended in the ink. The package does say to make sure they are stored horizontally, which I was careful to do, but there still seems to be some issues with particle distribution, just as there often is with shimmer inks in fountain pens. The difficulty here is that it's harder to take apart and troubleshoot a felt tip marker than it is a fountain pen.
Another issue I had with these is that the ink is more flowy than normal highlighter ink. Regular highlighters generally feel a bit dry, even squeaky, which is a feature not a bug. The last thing you want is highlighter bleed-through, where it looks like the wrong side of the page is highlighted. Unfortunately, these bleed through a bit more than normal highlighters. They even cause a bit of paper buckling from the wetness of the ink. Caveat: these results were mostly on regular copy paper, which is what most of my school readings are printed on. They did not show any bleed-through or buckling on Rhodia paper. So if you're highlighting your own notes in a good notebook, you likely won't have any problems.
Apart from these issues, I do like them, maybe more as markers than as highlighters. The colors themselves are beautiful and not too bright or hard on the eyes. I think they'll be great for use in planners. The set of four costs $7.50; there's a set of 8 for $15; and individual colors are available for $1.75. That's a great deal for how long these highlighters last. I read and highlight many hundreds of pages every week and the Faber-Castell Textliners last longer than every other highlighter I've tried (I have tried all of them, as far as I know).
If you need to add some sparkle to your notes, I do recommend these so long as you have good paper, or don't mind a bit of destruction to your cheap paper.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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