Frixion erasable pens are hugely popular in Japan, but relatively unknown in the States. I didn’t even hear about them myself until 2012, though the product has existed for 5+ years. Frixion pens are not the smearing horror pens that you may have used in school — the ink is not rubbed away — it… READ THE REST
I wonder how well these get around ‘anti altering’ technology in paper checks and other documents?
Sweet Jesus I had forgotten how awful those ‘eraseable’ pens were in the 80s. “Smearing horror pens” is an absolutely correct and accurate description.
1 Like
probably completely, so don’t write checks with them.
(just in case it’s not obvious: these pens use a special thermally-reversible ink, kind of like invisible ink in reverse. the `eraser’ won’t do anything to regular ink.)
So we erase it with Fire? or Lasers?
So if the cashier when you’re writing a check gives you “Their pen” they can magically remove the ‘pay to’ and amount and rewrite it.
Oh wait…what is this “check” thingy?
Yeah, I guess… of course, just showing the bank and police the carbon copy would be enough to get that cashier sent to the hoosegow.
One of my students wrote all her notes in class with one of these pens, then left her binder in her car on a warm summer day. When she returned, her entire notebook was blank. That was fun.
(I’ve heard that it may be possible to recover some of the text by putting your erased notes into the freezer for a while. I don’t know how well it works, though, if at all.)
2 Likes
this is actually nothing new in (continental) europe, but yeah those pens are great, i love them for taking while playing pen and paper games.
As far as I know, the ink becomes viewable (i.e. coloured) when it is lowered to -20˚C, which is pretty hard to do with a lot of household freezers.
most decent household fridge units have a freezer that goes down to at least 0 ºF, which is -17.8 ºC. that’s pretty close, at least, and many do better.
Muji have been selling versions of this pen in the UK for a while now, they’re great.
As well as the freezer trick you can still read any erased writing by the slight indentation the pen makes on the page
I have used freezer spray ($5 a can at your local electronics supply store) to recover accidentally erased Frixion writing.Worked a treat.
1 Like
I’ve just bought a new fridge/freezer which shows the temperature. By default the freezer part is -20°C but it can go lower.
The ones I remember had these black or blue erasers on the back with some sort of grit or sand in them - they didn’t really erase the ink, they just abraded away the paper that had the ink on it. Depending on the paper in question, you either sanded down to a writable surface, or just sanded a hole in the paper…
I have this new-fangled kind of pen whose ink is completely unaffected by heat or cold…
What I remember is that it was a little of both as far as “erasable” pens in the 80s – smeary ink and abrasive erasers.
So does this ink ever STOP being heat-disappearing? Seems like a bug.
