Dye Ink
Most color printers are "inkjet" printers. These use dye inks, and that's perfectly fine 👍.
The ink can be rather cheap, they do a great job especially on glossy paper, and as long as you take care to not put them in direct sunlight or other UV sources, they can last for quite some time.
Inkjet printers spray tiny droplets 💦 of liquid ink onto paper to create an image.
However, the dye is water-soluble, so if the paper gets wet, blurring may happen.
These non-archival prints, when exposed to heat and sunlight can start deteriorating in 5 years or less, and we do not have a printer capable of making average-lasting stickers.
We use Pigment Ink 💪
We want our stickers and prints to last my good man! They must last a long time, longer than we will! ⚰️😔 (pls take care of our plants)
Apart from stickers we also make fine art prints 🖼, which again, must last! And fridge magnets 😅.
But anyway, pigment inks are made up of solid particles suspended in a liquid. This offers insane longevity 📅, water resistance 💧 and the print is less prone to fading when exposed to light 💡🌞 having much better UV resistance than dye inks.
Colors are stable immediately after printing so we could face roll on the sheet (don't worry, we don't) and relatively insensitive 😭 to environmental factors such as high intensity face rolling 🔄.
This makes pigment inks suitable for professional-level archival printing, especially for fine art prints and cool stickers, with deep blacks and colors that remain stable over time.
Their durability also makes them suitable for printing on textiles 👚 or other applications where resilience is critical, such as outdoor stickers!
Since pigment ink is waterproof it's also lick proof 👅, though we don't recommend it neither to you nor to your 🐶 / 😽 / 🐠.
The pigment inks sit on top of the printed surface rather than inside it as dye-based inks do. This means that this ink is slightly easier scratched off, so if you face roll on them, please shave first.
Our printer is a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO 300, and it prints superbly 🤩.
This quality comes at a higher price 💸 though due to the pigment inks being far more expensive than dye inks 😨. However in the grand scheme of things we think quality 💎 > quantity 💩.
Also we could never beat factories that dish out 50 generic or AI generated stickers for 2$, not even with the eco tanks printers (dye ink printers that you refill with a bottle instead of buying a cartridge).
These archival prints can last between 40 to up to 300 years 👴. However they also need an archival medium to print on, which can't really be found as self-adhesive for stickers. So we'd expect they will last a long time, but not 300 years 😂.
