Omas Leads

Omas are an Italian brand of luxury writing instruments. Like most luxury brands they place their emphasis on fountain pens, but they do offer a small number of instruments that write with lead rather than ink. I don’t have any Omas mechanical pencils, but I do have some of their leads.

(Both pictures above are clickable for high res beauty)

I think these are the fanciest leads I know. Beautiful little cardboard lead packages. The colours, the styling of the ladies, the Greek key type design on the sides of the packages, it all feels sumptuously Art Deco to me. I love it. On the ends of the ends of the package we have “Made in Italy”.Open the package up, and behold…

……leads from Schmidt???? Many of you will know of Schmidt, the German manufacturer of writing instrument components. I don’t know if they make mechanical pencil leads themselves – I’ve always assumed they just bought them from a specialist lead manufacturer e.g. from their countrymen at Staedtler or Faber-Castell. So what’s with the ‘Made in Italy’ tag on the Omas packages? I’m surprised at the concept of there being a factory in Italy making mechanical pencil leads, but maybe there is one? Maybe the Omas package is misleading? I am sure that wherever they are made, any lead associated with companies like Schmidt and Omas will be of good quality, but you certainly pay a lot to have it repackaged in Omas livery. Still, I’m happy with my purchase – those little packages really are classy.