Luxor Highlighter Pen Set – Test

Yellow highlighter pens are a modern classic. They blend into the background of every student’s desk and office drawer. But are they actually a great art tool? We test out the Luxor Pens Highlighter Set in 5 “Super Fluorescent” colours to figure that out. Adding a fluorescent pink, a blue, an orange and a lime green to the classic yellow fluorescent highlighter pen, this set of highlighters is one of the most fun marker pen sets, or just plain coloring sets, we’ve tried in a very long time!

Do artists need to choose these crazy colours to get a surprisingly flat and vibrant coloring experience with chisel-tip markers? Watch to find out. Yes, yes, you can use it to study too. If you must.

Vishal: Hello and welcome to Stationery Test Drive where every week we take fun tools and mundane tools and do anything but the mundane with them. I’m Vishal.

Samir: I’m Samir.

Minjal: This is Minjal.

Vishal: And today we have the very mundane piece of office stationery that pretty much all of us know and all of us have used and all of us have either cursed at some point for making it bleed through or that it’s dried out but here we have it – the highlighter. It’s the highlight of your week and mine.

Samir: Yeah this was a completely unexpected pleasure. We picked it up because Luxor is a very popular Indian brand, mostly making what most would consider kind of boring office stationery and we came across this pack of highlighters, they were relatively inexpensive.

Vishal: They’re a couple of dollars, 5 colors, a nice bright pink, a highlighter neon yellow, a surprisingly minty green.

I remember the first time I saw a highlighter was in an office? I think I’d gone to my dad’s office, he had to go there to do some work and I thought, “oh my god they have color pencils in offices!” Well, it turned out that at least back then in the 80s highlighters were pretty terrible, they dried out and they would bleed. You would get a photocopied piece of paper and then run the highlighter over it in order to highlight things. Whereas these Luxor Highlighters have been an absolute pleasure to use.

Minjal, what about you? What did you think? What your experience? You’re only one of the three of us we should add that has worked in an actual office, in a day job with actual office timings.

Samir: Share your experience!

Minjal: I remember I last used highlighters when I did my Masters, it’s been a decade. You’re supposed to go through some 70 – 80 research papers to write one article and how on earth will you remember the important points without a highlighter? I believe Sharpies and Stabilo highlighters are very popular with students.

When I used the Luxor Highlighters, I realized they’re very vibrant, and great fun to use specially for non – academic purposes. The potential of these Luxor highlighters is beyond just marking and highlighting, they can actually be used to create art!

Vishal: Well, we are all about creating art, should we show some of that art?

Minjal: Absolutely. I wrote a Gujarati idiom with the Luxor highlighters and used 3 colours from the set for shading and gradation. The idiom roughly translates to ‘silence is golden.’

Vishal: So it’s the pink, the blue, the orange. You don’t even think that it’s only 3 colors, it seems like 50 of them.

Samir: It mixes so well visually that you lose track of what the original colors are.

Minjal: Yes, I tried freehand graffiti style lettering also with the Luxor Highlighter Pen set. I realized that when you use the highlighters on cartridge paper or paper with some texture the writing turns out really gritty and grungy.

Vishal: Yeah, it lifts off in certain places, it has a nice live edge as they would say if it was a piece of wood. It feels almost like you’re screen printing something but with more of a hand. There’s a lot to it that’s not a mechanical office tool.

Samir: On the smooth paper it’s a very clean, very beautiful and on cartridge paper it’s almost painterly.

Vishal: I was surprised by how liquid and smooth these were and maybe because they’re brand new. And, this is my test drive for the week. I’m not really a comic art person but I enjoy doing the odd random page to see if I can actually put something together.

The highlighters were a great chance for me to use Sumi Ink. With the highlighters I could get color on the page without too much hassle but also really lean into the psychedelic nature of it. I did a bit of layering and mixing with multiple highlighter pens.

I would gladly use the Luxor Highlighters again maybe not for something super controlled but where I don’t mind some of the chaos, where I don’t mind the kind of like the scratchy, grungy underground comics kind of look. Samir, you I think did the layering the most of all of us, right?

Samir: Yeah, I think Minjal’s was to do a very controlled sort of mixing which looks lovely, you did some overlapping in kind of patterned ways. And I seem to have gone and mixed everything.

Minjal: That is like a true test of the highlighters. You’ve used all the colors, right?

Samir: Yeah, I put everything down there.

Vishal: Multiple times and in layers on top of each other, next to each other.

Samir: Yes, sometimes in in the wrong order in that it’s obviously better to do a dark color on top of a light color so that you don’t mess up the felt tip of the lighter colors, but I might have broken that rule a few times.

Vishal: I think breaking the rules is a good idea with these. As we said they’re highlighters, they’re made for highlighting things on paper, text usually. This is a great artistic use of them, and you can do some wonderful things.

Samir: We’ve seen this pattern with other things before which is that what used to be kind of a very scratchy and sometimes disappointing piece of office stationery or school stationery has just improved so much over the years and we’ve seen this especially with markers. I mean these actually remind me a lot of the DOMS Sketch Pens which were just so much better than we thought they would be. Both DOMS Sketch Pens and the Luxor Highlighters are very similar in how saturated they are.

I think like we have looked at some of these very reasonable stationery brands from India before, I was actually not too familiar with Luxor. They’re kind of ubiquitous in that they’re available everywhere.

Vishal: They’re the background noise of the stationery store you go in and you see a bunch of Luxor things.

Samir: And most of the time it’s not even very school or student heavy stuff. It’s usually office things or very functional things like markers. And I was surprised to find out that they are actually the largest exporter of writing instruments in the country.

Vishal: Wow!

Samir: So clearly there are a lot of people out there wanting permanent markers and highlighters.

Minjal: Luxor also has very humble beginnings and they started with limited resources.

Samir: I believe it was started by the founder in a small shop in Delhi in 1963 with 5 employees and Rs. 5000/- which of course in 1963 was a fair amount of money.

From the beginning they very quickly went into manufacturing. It was not like they were in it to just sell stationery. They were manufacturing the first felt – tip pens in India by the 1970s, so less than 5 or 10 years after they started. And they introduced the highlighter in I believe 1982 or 83 which is just like 3 or 4 years after the highlighter was invented in the UK. They introduced ball pens and highlighters and sort of manufacturing them locally in the late 70s and early 80s.

I think over the years they have expanded a lot. I mean the Luxor is now I think in 120 countries or something like that. But at least in India their presence on the shelves is certainly more heavily towards the office stationery.

Minjal: Although these highlighters are so much more than just office stationery!

Vishal: I agree! We love the Luxor Highlighter Pen Set and you should definitely try it out for making art! And also follow us at the links on the screen that are there right now and please follow Inky Memo which has a lot more on the website including now transcripts of some of our earlier episodes.

Also, continue to subscribe on YouTube where we will be doing more test drives every week. Uncommon tools, common tools, office tools and fun things. We’ve got some really cheap and cheerful but really great tools coming up. We hope you’ll stick around for those.

Samir: And the thing that we didn’t come back to was does it require really, really bright and ridiculous looking colors to get some of the flattest and best and most colorful looking markers that you can get? Seems to be so because really other than the Poscas that we used I don’t think we’ve managed to get such beautifully flat layerings of colors with anything else.

I highly suggest that you look at our Posca video and for other markers that are surprisingly inexpensive and good, look at the video about the DOMS Sketch Pens.

1. Luxor Highlighter Pen Set – https://amzn.to/3ZjJkXE
2. Posca Pen Set – https://amzn.to/3PHx9k3
3. Doms Aqua 24 Shades Watercolour Sketch Pen Set  – https://amzn.to/3sTgEsh