I’ve Become Absolutely Obsessed With Ralph Nader’s Pens. Join Me on My Continuing Investigation.

This is Paper Mate’s preferred theory.

Nader has been using Paper Mate Flair pens consistently since the late 1980s (and we even found a photo from the early ’70s in which he appears to be taking notes with one). He has repeatedly maintained that the pens are now drying out more quickly than before.

He’s not alone. Commenters on our original article, on the website MetaFilter, and on social media corroborated this.

“He’s right! I’m a teacher, and if I grade all my student exams, the Flair is toast!” said Wirecutter reader Mike Alberti in an Instagram DM to me. “You know when you test out a pen and are happy with the ink flow, color, the feel of how it moves across the paper? It becomes the opposite of that.”

Paper Mate insists the pens are still great.

“The Paper Mate team has not made any changes to Flair’s ink formula or design,” a representative from Paper Mate told us in April, prior to the publication of our original article. “The brand is consistently monitoring product performance, and there have not been any changes in production that would indicate a material decline in the pen’s writing performance.”

The company rep did not indicate what timeline they were referring to in their statement, and they did not respond to our multiple requests to speak with an executive or product designer from Paper Mate for additional insight.

The Flair pen first came on the market in 1966.

Paper Mate started as an independent company and was then owned by Gillette for decades until Newell Brands (then called Newell Rubbermaid) purchased Paper Mate in 2000.

In the nearly 60 years the Flair pen has existed, the barrel and cap have gone through at least one redesign, likely around 2010.

At some point, the Flair pen’s manufacturing moved from the United States to Mexico. We suspect it was around 2004, as indicated on the oldest packaging we could find that made that claim.

Max Wastler, a Flair fan and Wirecutter reader who has been collecting old Flair pens from eBay, outlined the evidence that the pens have changed.

“The earlier versions of the pen had a ribbed barrel, which provided a better grip for the smooth plastic cap, exactly as Mr. Nader recalled. Furthermore, the company has moved from using white plastic to clear plastic around the felt, which makes the tip’s bleed or dryness less visible,” he wrote in the comments section of the original article.

To further our investigation, we studied both vintage and modern Flair pens.

• Wastler sent me a set of older Flair pens, and we also purchased new-in-box vintage Flairs from eBay with copyright dates of 1966 (a first edition!), 1983, and 1989.
• Nader had previously sent us 55 dead Flair pens that he felt had dried out too quickly, all of which were the redesigned models. The boxes of the pens he sent were copyrighted in 2010 and 2018.
• We also purchased a box of brand-new (2023) Flair pens at an office supply store to compare them against everything else.

As seen clearly in the photos, the pens went from a ribbed barrel to a smooth barrel, and the nib has gone from white to clear plastic.

The nib design may be the issue. A comment on The Well-Appointed Desk blog from 2016 caught our eye:

“When PaperMate introduced the plastic or white point guard they destroyed the best qualities of a once illustrious sketching felt pen. The original larger all felt tip (without the point guard) allowed for more expressive lines. … The ink load and intensity of this new design again pales in comparison to the original flair felt pens. From the get go they seem dried out.”

Another commenter said, “The original Flair had a bare fiber tip; some time in the late 70s or early 80s they added a white plastic partial sheath to ‘protect’ the tip, but which actually caused ‘mushrooming’ and shortened the life of the pen.”

We contacted Paper Mate reps directly, as well as more than a dozen people associated with Paper Mate via LinkedIn, and we did not receive any response to corroborate this.

So, obviously, we had the pens scanned.

Melanie Pinola, senior staff writer and author of our pen guide, pointed me to a company called Lumafield that sells industrial CT scanners to companies to help them run quality assurance on its products or help its engineers refine product designs. Melanie first discovered Lumafield when it had creatively used its technology to investigate how much toner was really inside so-called full printer cartridges. (The answer: not much.)

We sent Lumafield the 1966, 1983, 1989, and 2023 Paper Mate Flair pens we bought, and the company went to work. For good measure, Lumafield ordered a second 1966 pen from eBay to see if the results would be consistent.

Lumafield confirmed the pen design has changed. Particularly intriguing is that the 1983 version appears to be made from a different type of plastic than the others. “The [1983] pen was pretty significantly reformulated in terms of plastic at this point and then went back to a similar type of plastic by the late 80s,” said Jon Bruner, Lumafield’s head of marketing.

In addition, he noted that the 2023 version is likely made of recycled plastic. There have also been changes to the pen cap and closure throughout the years.

I reached out to Brian Goulet, the CEO and co-founder of The Goulet Pen Company, a well-regarded website that reviews and sells fountain pens and accessories. Since Flair pens use water-based ink, the same as fountain pens, Goulet felt it was similar enough that he could comment on the issue.

“Ink gets very complex [and] there’s actually quite a bit of variety and hardcore chemistry that goes on, and can vary a lot from one pen type to another,” Goulet told me in an 1,800-word email.

There are three types of pen ink, he explained: water-based, used in gel, rollerball, and fountain pens; alcohol- or solvent-based, used in felt-tip pens like Sharpies that have that distinctive odor; and oil-based, used in ballpoint pens.

“Within each of these ink bases, there are a LOT of different formulations and characteristics that a pen company can use. Most of these are highly proprietary trade secrets,” Goulet said.

It’s possible that even if Paper Mate hasn’t reformulated its ink, it’s still changed, said Goulet. Individual ink colors are made up of multiple raw dye components. “Sometimes variations in the dye components themselves can shift the color or property of an ink even if the exact same supplier and formulation is used by the ink maker,” he said.

Interestingly, Nader noted that the purple pens always lasted longer than the other colors, which likely nods to the formulation that makes the ink purple.

“Just as there are trade secrets with pen/ink makers, there are trade secrets with THEIR suppliers and they may not disclose if there are changes made over time,” Goulet said. “That said, Paper Mate is a large company and may have more control over their own ink formula.”

Goulet wasn’t kidding when he mentioned “trade secrets.” I contacted two ink chemists, the editor of an ink trade journal (who has expertise in inks, just not water-based pen inks), PR teams at competitive felt-tip pen companies, and many more potential insiders and experts.

Only the team from Faber-Castell’s headquarters in Germany were willing to talk.

I spoke with Gerhard Lugert, PhD, the director of development, and Helmut Zeilinger, the senior technical product manager, both of whom have worked for Faber-Castell for decades. They confirmed that economic fluctuations and raw material availability can play a factor in how ink formulation is adjusted over time.

Paper Mate might not be filling the pens as fully as they had before, a theory floated by Melanie, Wirecutter’s pen expert.

Melanie said she wouldn’t be surprised if most new pens—not just the Flair pens—are not full of ink; similar to opening a bag of potato chips and finding it half full.

“Just as with printer ink cartridges, we can’t tell just by looking how much ink is in a pen unless the pen has a clear barrel or you’re using a refillable pen,” Melanie said.

Newell Brands, Paper Mate’s parent company, is not immune to cost-saving measures and corporate restructuring. In a world of shrinkflation, not filling the pens as fully as before isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

While we understand that comparing vintage with modern samples doesn’t account for the product design changes and any evaporation that has occurred in the literal decades since the pens we bought off eBay have been sitting in their packages, we needed to satisfy our curiosity.

Michael Hession, Wirecutter’s director of photography, weighed each pen on a Timemore Black Mirror Pro coffee scale to determine if there was a significant difference among them. The 2023 pen weighed in at 7.3 grams while the 1989 pen was a heftier 7.9 grams.

The experts at Lumafield confirmed we can’t prove this theory. “It’s difficult to ascertain the amount of ink that’s present in the pens due to a few factors: age, the sponge material drying out over time, type of ink used, being transported by airplane, etc,” said Eric Petralia, Lumafield’s PR and social media specialist.

The Faber-Castell execs also gave this theory a nod as possible, but we had to set it aside as a highly possible but difficult to prove hypothesis.

This was one of the most common theories and one that was brought up by Nader’s camp, as well as multiple Wirecutter readers.

Nader uses his Paper Mate Flair pens for all types of writing, but he is particularly focused on marking up The New York Times and sending out the clippings. Hence, if newsprint has changed, it could be affecting the longevity of the ink in the Flair pens that Nader is using.

Nader is half right.

“Newsprint has changed,” confirmed Mike Connors, the managing director of The New York Times College Point production plant.

This is not a gotcha moment.

Paper has what’s called a basis weight. Due to rising costs, The New York Times switched from 30-pound basis weight to 27 pounds for most of the sections about a decade ago.

As paper stock gets lighter, it actually absorbs less ink, not more. The printers have to adjust the strength of the ink they use to avoid what they call show-through. If one page has too much ink, for example, it appears smudged or creates shadows on the other side.

“When we lighten our newsprint, you have to have the gentle balance of the ink having that fidelity. You want people to be able to read it,” Connors said.

If anything, then, today’s newsprint soaks up less ink than it once did.

Based on Nader’s age (90), armchair experts have suggested that Nader may not be capping his Flair as tightly as he had in the past, or pressing as hard on the paper.

This would be quite common, and quite understandable. The natural course of aging means that older adults are likely to lose grip strength, and it starts happening around age 55, said occupational therapist Karen Jacobs.

And what that means for ink usage could truly go either way.

“An individual with reduced grip strength might have a lighter touch and might lay down less ink if they are using a pen where ink flow is pressure dependent. If the individual is struggling to maintain their grip on the writing instrument, they might apply more pressure and lay down more ink,” said Jacobs via email.

You can see an example of Nader’s current penmanship and force on the photo of his pen testing sheet below.

However, Nader’s camp denies any change here. “He has for all his life used the typewriter to write and still does,” his assistant, Shine-Erkh Picon, said. “So, he has pretty strong muscles in his fingers and does not have any problems with grip strength.”

Nader has complained multiple times that the pens don’t cap properly. “In the last four or five years, when you take the cover off the felt pen and lock it in at the other end, the new ones fall off more quickly than the old ones. They don’t lock in firmly, so you’re writing away and the thing flips off onto the floor,” he said in a phone interview last year.

It seems likely that either Nader or the pen itself aren’t closing as tightly, exposing the tip to more air and causing it to dry out faster.

In our testing for this article, the caps on the newer models still attached securely to both ends. We heard a satisfying click, and the cap held firmly to the back of the pen when in use, even when the pen was being waved around wildly.

Lumafield’s scans and analysis confirmed that, though design changes have been made throughout the years, the new pen caps still seem designed to be secure.

However, Lumafield did posit a theory that the recycled plastic in the current pen design could soften over time. Paper Mate doesn’t indicate on its website that it uses recycled plastic in the Paper Mate Flair pens, but scans of the 2023 pen show a telltale speckling that indicates recycled plastic.

Recycling plastic tends to reduce its quality and lose strength over time. In theory, that means a brand-new pen cap might fit securely but eventually become looser. And a loose cap leads to ink evaporation, as corroborated by the experts at Faber-Castell.

Lumafield has a fair bit of experience in this area, as manufacturers use its CT scanning technology to ensure the design of their product is on point. If they had complaints of a leaky shampoo bottle, for example, “Those companies can CT scan their leaky bottles and see why they might be leaking—because there’s a thread engagement issue, or because there’s an injection molding problem, that causes it to be weak at a particular corner,” said Bruner, head of marketing at Lumafield.

Switching to a percentage of recycled plastic in the pen may change or reduce some aspect of the performance of the product, so a company has to consider those trade-offs. It’s possible that reduced longevity is one of those trade-offs.

“The reason the old unsustainable plastics were being used in the first place is because they were ideal in some sense for the application. They’re strong, or they’re durable, or they’re easy to work with,” said Bruner.

We have a large time gap between the 1989 and 2023 pens we scanned. Lumafield only noticed this formula change in the 2023 version, so depending if and when Paper Mate switched to recycled plastic, there could have been a shift in pen performance over that time, though we do think this might be a stretch (pun intended).

What if Nader’s environment has become drier? Then his pens could be drying out due to the lack of humidity. This theory felt like a long shot, but it did pique our curiosity.

First, we reached out to two archivist organizations. Neither wanted to touch this theory.

“We are not able to comment on this. It is outside of our area of expertise, as it is about the performance of the ink in the pen and not the ink on a historic document,” said a representative from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Goulet, however, had something to say. While he says he has been unable to find scientific studies on the rates of evaporation of water-based ink in relation to relative humidity in the air, he has had “practical experience and 15 years of customers buying water based ink from Goulet Pens.”

“Pens using water-based ink dry out noticeably quicker in arid environments with a low relative humidity than in more humid environments. Even remaining in one location, the relative humidity can swing quite a bit just with changing weather, particularly when there are periods of drought or rain,” Goulet said.

The executives from Faber-Castell confirmed this. The temperature where the pen is stored and the air-tightness of the pen’s design are both key factors because the water-based ink can evaporate, reducing the pen’s shelf life.

“A normal fiber tip pen with water-based ink and good air tightness (in the construction of the barrel and the cap fits very good), normally has a shelf life of, say, three years. Normally, you get this result [when the] temperature is 68 to 77 Fahrenheit degrees. If you store it at, let’s say, 86 Fahrenheit, you will get only, let’s say, two years. Because it’s water,” said Lugert, who noted that Faber-Castell does lab testing on its pens to determine longevity in a number of conditions.

Picon, Nader’s assistant, confirmed that Nader remains in the Washington, DC, area and his location hasn’t changed (he hasn’t retired to Vegas).

I then contacted John Keefe, The New York Times weather data editor, to see if the DC Metro Area has become drier since 2009 (the year we believe the pen design changed).

He crunched some numbers.

First he downloaded the hourly humidity data from College Park, Maryland, and then averaged the hours in every month since January 2009. He then ran a regression to check for trends in the line graph and, well, in his words: “It’s dang near horizontal.”

In consultation with New York Times meteorologist Judson Jones, Keefe tried that math with the dew point, and the results told the same story.

“There is an ever-so-slight downward trend, but my gut says that’s not nearly enough to affect a pen, especially given the day-to-day (and month-to-month) variability,” said Keefe.

So it’s not the external environment that’s become drier. Could Nader’s office environment be the issue? I asked senior staff writer Tim Heffernan, who has deep knowledge of air-quality issues.

“Honestly I am skeptical,” he said. “Central heat and AC has been around forever, and both very considerably dry the indoor air relative to the outside air. If anything, I’d guess Nader’s home would be generally more humid now than it once was, because HVAC engineers have gotten more cognizant of the importance of moderate humidity to human comfort and health, and modern HVAC systems can (though not all do) keep it in the comfort zone while also keeping a building cool/warm enough.”

But still, as nothing around him has changed demonstrably, we can officially put this theory to rest.

The spent pens Nader sent us arrived in older-style boxes, one with a copyright from 2010 and one from 2018. Both boxes say the pens were made in Mexico.

Wirecutter fact checker Leslie Nemo suggested that Nader bought pens in bulk years ago, and they’ve started drying up before he had a chance to use them.

Nader says he’s been noticing the issue for awhile and had made attempts to get attention to it through Paper Mate and others, before approaching Wirecutter with the problem.

His assistant confirmed that they buy the pens in fairly small quantities for the amount of writing Nader is doing. “We buy three boxes of the pens that contain 12 pens each. I buy one box of each - blue, black, and red. So, not in large quantities where it is stored for a long time before Ralph requests for more,” Picon said via email.

In fact, when Michael, our photo director, opened the original 1966 pen packaging and did a writing comparison with the brand-new 2023 pens, the older pen actually had a deeper, richer tone. If it’s been sitting around for almost six decades and still maintains its vibrancy, we can safely toss out this theory.

This theory actually arose during my interview with the experts at Faber-Castell. They said that felt-tipped pens with pigmented inks should be kept horizontal when not in use. That’s because the ink storage reservoir in the pens is fibrous, akin to a cigarette filter, so if they’re stored vertically, ink and sediment pools due to the earth’s gravitational pull, according to Lugert.

“Sedimentation is an issue,” he said. “You can store it for some hours or some days tip down, and in this case it’s [working fine] again. But if you store for a longer time tip down and you try to [write with it, the sediment] is blocking. There’s no way really to bring this back.”

This theory only applies for pigmented inks.

We studied the photo of Nader at his desk and didn’t see a pencil cup or means for storing pens vertically within camera range.

Additionally, Nader’s assistant confirmed that all of Nader’s pens are stored horizontally in his desk drawer. The boxes of his backup pens are stored horizontally as well, making this theory fully debunked.

Until we have someone with knowledge of Paper Mate’s inner workings, we won’t truly have an answer here. (We have set up a tip line at 212-556-1314. You can leave a voicemail if you have any knowledge on this topic you would like to share.)

Regardless, we feel confident in confirming that the pens are drying out more quickly than before, and that it is likely multiple factors of quality degradation rather than just one. The redesign of the Flair pen’s nib and cap and any change in ink formulation could be the most likely culprits. It’s not all in Nader’s head. And yet, questions persist.

Nader’s assistant also recently reminded me that he’s concerned his pencil erasers aren’t holding up the way they once were. What do you think, my fellow conspiracy theorists, should we not put down our magnifying glasses quite yet?

This article was edited by Ben Frumin.