Fountain Pen Review: Platinum Preppy

Written on June 14th 2025,

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The TL; DR

Overall rating: 4/5, recommend for fountain pen newbies

The Materials/Price

A skykid sititng next to a stone surrounded by red candles
Some pics of the crack on my pen's tip.

The Preppy is mostly made of plastic, save for the nib and maybe some bits in the cap. I would maybe compare the build quality to other standard office pens, where if you're usually gentle with your pens these things can last a long time. However, I have heard and personally experienced that parts of the Preppy are prone to cracking. In my experience, the tip of my Preppy's cap began to crack after at least 1 year of use. Other people have reported cracks in more critical areas, like the rim of the cap or the pen body.

All that being said: the Preppy usually costs around 10 USD or less. This would be a lot for a regular ballpoint pen, but I think it's a fair price for a piece of equipment that can both be used longer and is more customizable than an average office pen. Maybe just skip out on this one though if you tend to be rougher with your pens.

Ease of Use

Thinking of it, this pen mainly gets recommended to fountain pen newbies because it works decently for its super low price. It's price isn't a factor on how easy it is to use, but I will say that it does need a little more pressure to write than other pens in my repertoire. As someone with a lighter writing hand, this makes it harder to use the Preppy, but for newbs who are used to the pressure needed to use a ballpoint, this might actually be a good thing. The Preppy, to me, is lighter to use than most cheapo ballpoints, but is also heavier than the fancier pens I have. The perfect medium.

The ease of use section will also cover how easy it is to fill this thing back up. The Preppy does come with cartridges, however if one were looking to try other filling methods on this pen (like adding a converter or eyedropper filling), I'd say refilling this thing for future use is super easy. The Preppy is compatible with the Platinum Fountain Pen Converter, and eyedropper converting it (which I have experience with!!) goes very smoothly with liberal usage of silicone grease on the pen threads.

Side tangent: When I eyedropper filled my fountain pens for the first time, I always read online you need rubber O-rings to seal the deal. However, since I don't have those, I just opted to use a lot of silicone grease and was pretty much fine for it? Like I've had my Preppy leak on me once, but considering the whole reservoir didn't leak out I'm inclined to think it happened for some Mystery Reason and not due a breach in the grease. Anyways.

Customization

I'm not the kind of person who will buy multiple copies of the same pens (idk... unless the design was SUPER BANGER) but the Preppy comes in a full rainbow of colors + some limited variants with cool print decals. This along with the low price point gives the Preppy a high collectability factor which may resonate with some people reading this.