Lamy – is it red?

Lamy have always been quite reserved on the colour front, tending to stick with blacks and grey metallics in the main. Occasionally they bring out something different and often rather good, but usually only as a ‘limited production’ item, such as the yearly Safari fountain pen in it’s limited production colour.

They have now extended the popular Studio range to include an new colour, ‘Royal Red’, but is it red? I find it very hard to justify calling it red: it’s orange! A rather nice ‘burnt’ orange, but definitely orange. I was not aware that giving red the ‘royal’ epithet changed it to orange.

They had similar problems with the ‘ruby black’ Studios a couple of years ago, they were brown. Again a good colour, but definitely not black, or even ruby. Royal red seems to have confused their printers too. We have received the promotional literature from Lamy for the Royal Red and all of the images are, well, red! I think that they just couldn’t bring themselves to print a red pen orange.

It’s good to see Lamy introducing more colour. It would be even better if they gave the colours sensible names.

Alan