The nice folks from Bic sent over a bunch of items recently that I will be reviewing, so I thought the first item we should take a look at are these Bic Cristal Bold Colors 1.6mm Ballpoint Pens. One thing that I didn't notice until after I opened these was that although the package says 10 pens in the bottom right corner there, you can actually see that inside the package there are 11 pens.
So the 1.6mm ballpoint pen is definitely the largest tip I've ever had the experience of using, but this is the second different version of this tip size I've used, with the first being the Staedtler Maxum. The Bic Cristal Bold comes with the following assortment of colors:
- Blue (2)
- Black (2)
- Purple (1, but I got 2 of these for some reason)
- Red (1)
- Pink (1)
- Aqua (1)
- Green (1)
- Light Green (1)
They have the same design as all of the other Bic Cristal pens that have been around since I can remember, but I did notice that curiously, some of the colors do not have transparent ink cartridges and instead they are white which is not a big deal, but you just cant see the ink level through them. One minor issue I had with these was with the little wax seal that comes on the tips so that they don't dry out. On a few of the pens it was a little difficult to get all of the wax off the tip in the first try, not a deal breaker at all, but slightly annoying.
Writing with the Bic Cristal Bold is certainly a unique experience with the extra bold 1.6mm tip since it glides across the paper so easily. Usually the larger the tip is the smoother and less scratchy the tip is, so this is definitely one of the smoothest ballpoint pens that you are going to find yourself writing with. The only minor issues I had with the writing experience were a few tiny skips that I think were a result of not getting all of the wax off the tip of the pens as I mentioned before. At the end of the day, Bic Cristal Bold Colors 1.6mm Ballpoint Pen is a very unique pen and you certainly are not going to find many options in this class, so definitely grab yourself a set of these as they are fun to write with and would probably even be good for some color coded underlining for your notes since the colors and line size are so bold.
