welcome to camp telophase

Don't worry, your markers are fine. It's salt. They're not moldy, just cheap. The markers are not toxic--as much as alcohol markers can be--and the markers are not dangerous. Wipe off the crud and go to town.

I'll explain, but I want artists searching for marker problems to find this post and learn that they won't sicken or die. To that aim, I shall attempt SEO keywords and writing techniques,[*] to hopefully rank high in search results. (This is why recipe pages often have miles of autobiography before the actual recipe. It ranks them higher.) I will probably fail and this post will just contain weirdly-written sentences about markers, mold and salt, but...I'm trying.

Skip to the answer. (Another SEO tactic! Really!)

Gross-looking markers!

These markers sat in a pencil cup on my desk at work for over a year while I've been working at home. I popped the cap off of one to see if it had dried out. I saw bumps all over the nib that looked like mold or fungus. At first, the growths creeped me out. But then, I realized these were alcohol markers. The weird growths were saturated with ink, so therefore full of alcohol.

So the markers aren't moldy?

Alcohol kills bacteria, mold spores, fungus spores and pretty much every organic thing that touches it. Which is why it stings when you sanitize your hands. Because the alcohol finds all those paper cuts you'd forgotten about, and starts killing your cells.

Therefore these fuzzy bumps were not mold, fungus, or any other organic growth. Unless something weird happened, and the alcohol evaporated leaving behind only pigments (or dyes or whatever the ink was made of), and the stuff grew afterwards. But that was not the case. Because the markers worked, which means the alcohol was still present. And the growths were colored, so they were saturated in alcohol ink.

Skip this bit if you don't want to be ranted at about "toxic"

Allow me to dissemble a bit on toxicity. Mold grosses you out unless you're a moldologist or something. And some species of mold can be toxic or unhealthy. Also, some fungus can be CREEPY AS ALL GET-OUT CORDYCEPS I AM LOOKING AT YOU (from a very long distance away). But us humans associate the circumstances--rot, decay, dead things, damp, dark hidden areas--with the mold or fungus itself. Which is just living its best life breaking organic matter down. unless it's controlling the behavior of ants aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

And the three-ring circus surrounding black mold, involving only one species within the "black mold" umbrella, has likely overstated the danger involved to people without pre-existing respiratory conditions or allergies, made worse by sketchy "labs" doing "tests" in order to scare you into buying extremely expensive mold-reduction treatments. So people now see something that looks like mold and freak out because they think it's toxic or dangerous.

Word to the wise: if someone who isn't a scientist uses "toxic," you'll want to double-check that they know what they're talking about. Also another word to the wise: random drive-by comments haranguing me about how terrible black mold really is will be deleted. Allergies and asthma can be deadly, so removing it is good. But is it the end of Western civilization as we know it? No. Find a reputable company that isn't pushing expensive tests and get it taken care of, but don't freak out. I am not a lawyer moldologist, so this is neither medical nor legal advice. But I am a librarian, so this is research advice: slow down and use your critical thinking skills. Assess the source.

MARKERS? This post is supposed to be about MARKERS. Not random venting about what people think is "research."

ANYWAY. MARKERS. So these growths are not toxic, well, ok, you really don't want to lick or drink marker ink because the alcohol is toxic, but the growths are far less dangerous to you than the alcohol is. The pigments probably won't do you any good, either. Don't eat your markers, ok?

GET TO THE POINT. WTF IS GROWING ON MY MARKERS?

The fuzzy bumps on your marker nib are caused by desalinization. Or desalination if you prefer that word variant. Salts leach out of the ink and crystallize on the exterior of the nib.

The salts mostly wipe off--my chisel-tip nibs recovered fine, although the brush nibs are rather the worse for wear. I found another post where an artist suggests adding alcohol to the nibs to dissolve the salt and ink back into the marker. I don't have alcohol here, so I can't test that. But it might be better for your nibs than wiping if you're using the markers for art.

Anyway, the real reason your markers have fuzzy gross bumps on them is cheap ink, cheap nibs. You will find no judgement here! I have nothing but cheap markers now! I got rid of my Copics because I wasn't using them. (They went to yhlee, not the trash, if you were worrying.)

Also, at least one company changed their ink formula and nib construction to stop the desalinization, so do feel free to complain. You might get free replacement markers! Maybe! I won't complain because I use the markers as highlighters, so salty fuzzy bumps I can wipe off aren't a big deal.

I shall cap this post off by using another SEO tactic: embedding a video. (I think people tend to stay on pages longer if they watch the video, which makes the page rank a bit higher.) This is the video I found that explained that marker ink desalinizes. There is some OMG IS THIS TOXIC??? DRAMA at the beginning. But I have linked it starting at the section of the video where the artist talks about the letter she received from the company explaining the weird growths as desalinization.



That's it! Enjoy your markers in peace! Don't forget to like and subscribe and ring the little bell in order to be noti-------asdfkn dgff;vndfvnighfio asgh;AI OSKNFV'

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* SEO-friendly (for now): short-ish sentences, attempt not to use what the computer thinks is passive voice (WHICH IS NOT PASSIVE VOICE, AHEM), seed a bunch of keywords in there, use transitional words (because, therefore, etc.) to make it seem like the sentences are connected in a cause-effect relationship, short sections with section headings. Which results in weird-sounding sentences and sweeping generalizations. I do end up failing a lot at SEO, because I revert to using GINORMOUS WORDS and INTERNET LINGO and WANDER OFF THE TOPIC. And probably just mentioning it here will make the algorithm push this farther down the ranks. XD Anyway, Google is trying to create an algorithm that finds real information written by real people that accurately answer real questions that real people are looking for, but you know, it's next to impossible for a machine to do that. THIS IS WHY YOU NEED LIBRARIANS, PEOPLE. In conclusion: ALL HAIL THE ALGORITHM. I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR ALGORITHMIC OVERLORDS