Needs more Flair

An ode to the humble felt tip pen and impermanence

They run out quickly, so I buy them by the box

Hey y’all,

Today I wanted to write an ode to the humble Paper Mate Flair, an ubiquitous felt tip pen that is easily purchased at any office supply store or stolen from any office supply closet.

The Flair works its bleedless black magic on the thin pages in my Moleskine Diary that I use for my logbook and the Leuchtturm 1917s I use as pocket notebooks.

When the pens are new, they have a hard, thin line, but if you want the kind of fat line that I love, you can break the felt tip in quickly just like a Sharpie.

I stopped using the Flair pen years ago after putting a notebook through the washing machine. The ink in Flair pens is water-based, so everything written in Flair was dissolved from the page, but everything in permanent ink or pencil mostly survived. I got spooked by the ghost pages and switched to using pencils and pens with more permanent inks, like my beloved Pilot G-2 bolds.

But in the past few weeks, I have let the Flair back into my life…