Unsharpen

Pens and Pencils | Reviews and Data

Pilot

The Best Gel Pens of 2024

Pentel Energel

There are few writing instruments that are more satisfying than a great gel pen. The right gel pen is buttery smooth, has color that pops off the page with excellent legibility, and is a pleasure to write with on nearly any paper. Gel pens are one of the best and most versatile ways to write in 2024.

There are many gel pens sold today. While there aren’t too many truly bad gel pens left, a few stand out from the rest. We’ve extensively tested dozens of gel pens since 2018… these are our favorites.

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Fountain Pen Cartridge Guide

In theory, using a fountain pen cartridges should be easy — you insert one into your pen and you start writing. In practice, they are rather confusing. Some cartridges only work on one brand of pen, some work on lots of pens… and they all look alike! Cartridges are rarely labeled well and the downside of messing up a cartridge installation can be a broken pen (bad) or a leaky cartridge (often worse).

This guide will answer most common fountain pen cartridge questions as well help you visually identify which cartridge is which.

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Vintage Pilot Murex and MYU Fountain Pens Untangled

Learning about vintage fountain pens is a difficult proposition as the history of pens and the companies behind them is poorly documented and information often comes from a single source when anything was bothered to be written down.

Anyway, some pens have a rich history that is worth digging into, like the Pilot Vanishing Point and, in this case, the Pilot MYU and Murex.

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The Best Retractable Fountain Pens of 2021

If you want a retractable fountain pen, you have to understand that you are diving into a niche within a niche. Only a tiny subset of fountain pens are retractable, so there isn’t as much competition as you’d expect, but this is still a rich and interesting segment of the pen market.

Let’s review today’s top retractable fountain pens.

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5 Truly Exceptional Pen Refills

It’s rare that you are in the market for a pen refill, rather you are likely trying to buy a refill for a specific pen. Even so, here are some truly exceptional pen refills that are worth keeping an eye out for when you next need a new refill for one of your pens.

These are refills that simply make me happy each time I use them and surprise me with their quality when I revisit them. These are refills that are worth buying a pen so you have somewhere to put them.

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Pen Refills Guide

Pen refills come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of these are standards, shared across pen brands and decades of pen designs, while other are propriety and limited to just a few brands or even a few models. This means that replacing the ink in a pen, especially an older one, may end up being a more difficult task than you’d expect.

The goal of this article is to make buying a new ink refill for your pen as easy as possible. A secondary goal to this guide will be maximizing the number of refill options available for each pen. This is only possible once you have a good understanding of refill shapes and which are interchangeable.

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