The Faber Castell Perfect Pencil Family
The company
Faber Castell is a German company, formed in 1761. It is one of the larger and more common pencil manufacturers in Europe, and is quite well known for its higher end Castell 9000 pencils.
The pencil itself
I have a few ‘perfect pencils’ - three in fact. For this entry I’ll be describing the Perfect Pencil DESIGN, and specifically I have a ‘brown’ set:
And just for future reference, here is the small collection of perfect pencils I own:
Yes, that green perfect pencil did come with a short length 9000 pencil already in it. I will get to reviewing the other two perfect pencils in their own reviews another week - it didn’t feel like I’d get enough hands on time with them all if I tried them all at once.
How does it write
When I started using the pencil this week I thought to my self, hmm, somewhat hard and scratchy. Compared with the previous two Japanese pencils, the lead in this is pretty hard. Having said that, as the week went on I found that the lead perormed fine, and givne the hardness of th lead the point retention was significantly better than the somewhat darker Japanese pencils.
Previously when I’d picked up the ‘perfect pencil’ (and, no, I’m not really going to debate if this is the pervect pencil or not :-) ) I thought and found, that the pencil cap was going to be far too heavy and make the pencil very top heavy, and thus uncomfortable. I have to admit though, as the week went on I found that it did not interfere with my writing as much as I expected. I could cope with it quite well for the week.
The sharpener
One nice point about the perfect pencil is that it is a cap for the pencil and a sharpener. This makes it really nice as a carry around pencil, in theory - take it to a coffee shop and you can get there without sticking a hole in your pocket, and if you get really creative over your flat white then you can resharpen there and then (without whipping out your pocket knife and freaking everybody out…). OK, so the sharpener might be OK in an emergency. When I broke the pencil out at the beginning of the week, even though the pencil was already pretty shart, I gave the sharpener a spin. Oh dear, it snapped off the tip. I’m sure they work well enough out in the field, but when at my desk I think I’ll stick to my trusty X-Acto model L. That lives screwed to my desk, is in daily use, and for the last 3 years has been working really rather well.
and, as a pencil extender?
It did occur to me, whilst using the perfect pencil, that although it is supplied with a shorter than standard pencil, the cap will effectively act as a pencil extnder. Therefore, you should get significantly more use out of your pencil stubs. If desperate, I guess you could even use the perfect pencil cap to use up those stubs you may have laying around already.
Sourcing
These are pretty easy to source. They are possibly one of the only pencils you will find in some of the highstreet posh pen shops (which iirc is where I got my DESIGN model from). I also think you occasionally find them in some of the big box stationery stores, which is where I got my bottom of the range one from.
Pricing is, well, choose your spot - the bottom of the range starts around £3 or so, or you can stretch out to the solid silver editions at more like £360. No, I don’t own nor do I suspect will I ever own one of those :-)