Posts filed under Highlighter

Faber-Castell Textliner 38 Highlighter Review

(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)

These days, highlighters aren't essential to my workflows or journaling practice, but they're still fun to play with. I've always enjoyed adding a bright pop of color to printed or written notes, though I'm not sure the extra color actually aids in studying later. Either way, I think the more colors you have available for highlighting, the better. With the Faber-Castell Textliner 38 6-pack, you get plenty of options to differentiate your callouts.

The Textliner 38 is a slim body highlighter that features ultra fluorescent ink colors. The slim body is easy to handle and control when marking over text, and you also have the option of two different line widths due to the chisel tip. With the 6-pack, you get yellow, red, purple, pink, green, and blue color options, and they're all appropriately loud hues.

The chisel tips on these highlighters work really well. The broad side is about 4mm wide and the narrow side is just 1.5mm. Both sides are really sharp and lay down crisp lines.

The colors of each marker are fantastic, but I'm a little bummed with how dark the purple is on paper. I'd like it to be just a little lighter, but it's still perfectly usable as-is.

I haven't had any trouble with ink smearing under the highlighter with printed out pages, but some fountain pen inks or rollerball inks smear and feather a bit when using these highlighters over them. It's not a drastic amount of smear, but it's worth noting. If you only plan on using these highlighters in textbooks and printed notes, you should be fine.

Another thing I like about these highlighters is the shape. The slim shape is similar to a large bodied fountain pen, so it fits easily into sleeves, pouches, pockets, and cases designed for regular pens. There are plenty of highlighters out there that have a non-standard shape, and those can be problematic to store and carry. These highlighters don't share that problem, and they also have a handy pocket clip in case you need to attach them to something.

These Faber-Castell Textliner 38 highlighters work great, and I'd recommend them to anyone that needs a variety of colors for highlighting notes, textbooks, or their own handwritten notes or plans. Six colors is a great variety, but you can also buy an 8-pack for around $10 (Amazon affiliate link) that includes an extra yellow highlighter plus a nice orange one as well!

(Faber Castell Maylasia provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Posted on December 7, 2022 by Jeff Abbott and filed under Faber-Castell, Highlighter, Pen Reviews.

Stabilo Boss Pastel Highlighter Review

(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!)

If you're reading or studying to the point of eye strain every day, then pastel highlighters are a godsend. When my eyes are exhausted and there are many chapters to go, the last thing my vision needs is searing neon. I've become a huge fan of softly colored highlighters since returning to school, and these Stabilo Boss Pastel Highlighters are perfect for study time.

This 4-color set includes Breezy Blue, Dusty Gray, Frozen Fuchsia, and Pale Orange. The colors are saturated enough to be easily visible on the page, but calm enough that they're pleasant to look at. The grey can be a little harder to see when highlighting on paper that is cool toned or photocopies that have shadows or static. It works well on plain, clean paper, though. The blue is my favorite, as it's the calmest while still being very visible.

The highlighter bodies are flat and wide, which makes them easy and comfortable to grip. The broad surface gives you excellent control for marking in straight lines. They have the classic chisel tip, which can be used to make broad lines, or rotated to use the tip for narrower marking. The bodies do have a lot of branding on them, including barcodes, but I'm less worried about the aesthetics of something as utilitarian as a highlighter. I go through them pretty quickly, anyway. But these ones last longer than most--the broad body packs a nice, full cartridge.

The cap snaps in place and removes easily with a bit of a twisting motion. The cap does not post, however, which is a bit of a bummer for a highlighter. And there is no clip, which is a bigger bummer. I tend to use my highlighters as bookmarks, but they need that clip to stay put. Still, what they lack in cap features, they make up for in good ink.

The water-based ink in these highlighters has some magic potion added to it that prevents the tip from drying out even with prolonged use. It does not get dry or scratchy even hours into studying. That's very useful, as it can be easy to zone out when reading and forget about the highlighter till you need it again. The flip side to this wet ink is that it doesn't work very well over handwritten notes. It does fine with printer ink or textbook pages, but it smeared quite badly over gel pens, rollerball, and fountain pen ink (which it actually partially dissolved). It only slightly smeared mechanical pencil. Because of this, I think of these as better for studying and school use, and maybe less useful for planners or notes.

This set of 4 sells for $9.80 on JetPens, and individual colors are available for $2.45. It's a very fair price considering how long these last. This set will probably last me half the semester by themselves, while a regular highlighter doesn't make it a week. If your tired eyes have big studies ahead, I definitely recommend these.

(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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Posted on January 6, 2022 by Sarah Read and filed under Stabilo, Highlighter.

Faber-Castell Textliner Highlighter Metallic Review

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.)

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!