Welcome back to the Marilyn Darling Show—today I’m reviewing Van Dieman’s Hastings Cave, a pale yellow ink that is so sparkly I’m gonna die. I went through my usual ink swatch and water resistance test first, and the big takeaway is: it has a little bit of water resistance, but because it’s such a light color, I personally wouldn’t trust it on the outside of an envelope. I also did my two “toilet paper chromatographies” (one with water, one with rubbing alcohol) and you can see yellow with a little orange sneaking in there. Then I put Hastings Cave through a full paper gauntlet, and the shimmer is the star of the show—also, quick correction: the shimmer reads silver, not gold. On a lot of papers I got beautiful shimmer with a bit of shading, and many of them had no bleeding and no ghosting (Rhodia dot pad, CVS filler paper, Kokuyo 50gsm pad, Midori MD, and more). Some papers did struggle—like Five Star notebook paper feathering and bleeding, and a few had ghosting or micro-bleeding depending on the sheet. I wrapped up with a yellow-ink comparison panel and noted this ink can be a little uncooperative under direct light, so you may need to adjust lighting to really see what it’s doing.