Hinze Pens are perfect for when everything is coming up Carl

For purposes of this post your name is Carl

Having ups and downs is part of being human. The intensity, length, and frequency in which you experience these hills and valleys varies greatly from person to person, but it’s fair to say that everyone goes through stuff.

If these ups and downs are more intensely felt, you may find that you have developed aesthetic cues—consciously or not—that complement and flag for others when you are, for lack of a better descriptor, In A Mood. For example, you start to wear all black every day and listen exclusively to dark Italodisco.¹

When that’s the case, the pen world has you covered with an array of matte black pens perfect for brooding. It’s one area where all the manufacturers agree: black looks cool and is also nice when you’re in your feelings. For example:

From left: the Montegrappa Go Away, the Lamy You Don’t Understand Me, the Pineider Anhedonia, and the BENU Not Like The Other Pens

And, of course, sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes things are going your way and the wins are all the more sweeter for the two months you spent listening to Xymox and reading back issues of Sad Poetry For Boys. You feel so unstoppable that your Spotify playlist is just Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito² on repeat because, in these moments, 100 Gecs is too chill.

What does the pen world have to offer then? Especially if you are the sort whose baseline aesthetic is BENU? Is there something like BENU, but more BENU?

Yes. This:

These are from Hinze Pens. I got these from Hinze at a pen show a couple years ago and don’t know what the models are actually called, so let’s call them The Melissa (the teal and purple one) and Sergeant Pteranodon Esq.³ (the yellow and chaos one).

Both The Melissa and Sergeant Pteranodon Esq. are made of extremely colorful resin. They are large yet lightweight pens and one of them has a clip and you know what let’s just talk about the nibs that’s clearly what you are looking at right now.

You’re focusing on the nibs for good reason: a colorful nib turns an extra pen up to 11 and makes everyone take notice because they’re like “oh wow my eyes are on fire.” It is a hat on a hat, but in a cool way.⁴

This is partially because colorful nibs are fairly uncommon; most manufacturers do not even try with colored nibs. And they’re tricky; I pretty much exclusively use ultra-gentle inks and I once had the black finish on a nib degrade to the point where some of it could be wiped off with a paper towel. My guess is that most pen makers just do not want to mess around with this.

Not Hinze, though. Hinze has solved this problem with nano-ceramic blah blah blah—look, I am not going to pretend that I understand this. It is chemistry or magic or something. I’m not a science guy.

I do know that they are able to pull off a matte yellow nib that actually writes:

sorry the nib is dirty i just dipped it to make this GIF

And honestly, there’s not much else I need to say about Hinze. Their pens look like this. If that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what else to do.

(For what it’s worth, I will say that a small bit of the finish on the tip of the teal nib on The Melissa came off shortly after I got it, but I brought it back the following year (due to not caring enough to get it fixed sooner) and Hinze repaired it for free, so they stand by their stuff.)

You can check out these pens from Hinze’s website, which has a pretty wild array of choices. A recommendation, though: Hinze recently collaborated with The Gentleman Stationer and the collaboration is surprisingly metal. See:

Behold BARON VON BLOOD (picture from the TGS store)

I say “surprisingly” because The Gentleman Stationer is a lawyer—specifically, a litigator. I was a litigator a long time ago; self-expression was typically limited to being the guy who wears crazy socks to the office, as long at they are not too crazy and also there are no clients in the office that day and also there are no important partners visiting from New York actually maybe just don’t.

I suspect the profession has not changed much since I left it.

So I was psyched to see that this collaboration turned out looking like something that would be marketed as “for fans of West Coast thrash metal,” which is to say, cool.⁵ I am even more pleased that the pen does not have some awful legal pun for a name because it must have taken a mammoth amount of self-restraint to not name the collab something like “The Attractive Nuisance.”⁶

This should be supported! As of this writing he has a handful left—you can buy them from his website.

1. Because dance sadness is the most sadness.

2. Sorry if you had not seen this previously as this will be all you can hear for the next week.

3. The “esq” is because Sergeant Pteranodon is in the dinosaur equivalent of the JAG Corp. If you think that joke doesn’t work because those titles wouldn’t go together then I would remind you that the dinosaur legal system has its own rules and also shut up.

4. Like a pirate hat on top of a bowler hat.

5. Yes, I know that the colors are just his website’s branding, but since two of those colors are “blood” and “gunmetal” it counts.

6. Naming things with painfully unfunny legal puns is to lawyers what drinking blood is to vampires: it gives them life but only at great cost to everyone else.