Cosmo Air Light 75gsm Review

Warning - picture heavy post.

We don’t often do paper reviews on our blog, for the simple fact that we are a notebook manufacturer. Anything we say about a paper could be biased and any opinion we may have about another paper could be misconstrued as flagrant favouritism towards our own product. However, I would like to take this time to introduce you to a new paper that we’ve come across – Cosmo Air Light. A straight up disclaimer – we will be releasing a small line of notebooks with this paper in the next few days.

In our line of work we spend a fair bit of time trying to find new papers and testing them out. A number of papers we come across are suitable for fountain pen use, in that they tolerate fountain pens and inks, but don’t exhibit the inks well enough or aren’t comfortable or convenient enough to use everyday. Many papers that bring out the best in fountain pen inks are too slick for comfortable writing.

Its this quality that I value the most in Tomoe River Paper, along with its ability to show off the colours of various inks. Although its smooth, when writing with a fountain pen, there’s just enough tooth in the paper to help the ink continue to flow in the pen, so that you’re not inadvertently pressing too hard to keep the ink flowing, as I find in coated papers. Cosmo Air Light seems to exhibit a similar texture to Tomoe River in this sense. For scratchier pens, like the Muji Fountain pen, the paper is also forgiving – its like comfortable suspension so you don’t feel every bump on the road.

For those who aren’t fans of Tomoe River due to its crinkliness or ghosting, you’ll likely enjoy this paper more, as its about 1.5x heavier than 52gsm Tomoe River paper. In our tests, we couldn’t see any ghosting and the paper did not crinkle with basic handling. The downside to this is that its thicker and heavier, so less portable than Tomoe River. However, its still lighter in weight than most fountain pen tolerant papers (with the exception of Tomoe) so it will still be lighter than other paper options that are available.

Left : 200 pg Chiyogami Tomoe River Notebook. Right: 160 pg Artisan Cosmo Air Light Notebook

Enough talk for now, I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. All photos (where two papers are shown) have Cosmo Air Light on the left and Tomoe River 52gsm Original on the right

One final note, I’ve heard it said that Cosmo Air light seems to broaden the width of pens used on it. To my eye, this is most apparent in the Muji FP and the Copic Multiliner.

Our limited release of Cosmo Air Light notebooks will be announced on the 18th  of January, so be sure to sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Instagram to be notified of its release