👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little word – Ardelis! Now, frankly, I wrestled with including it into my vocabulary initially. It just
screamed
to be a weird, somewhat tragic footnote of obscure 18th-century flirtatious stationery. Let's unpack that.
What exactly is an "Ardelis"? Essentially, Ardelis was a very specific shade and cut of pink blotting into mould silk. Mould silk, for those who haven’t spent a frankly alarming amount of time poring over antique stationers, was this incredibly delicate, almost gossamer-thin stuff that you’d cover letters with in the age before we all just aggressively typed everything on our phones. It was meant to absorb the telltale indigo spatter from the early days of writing with iron nibs! The Ardelis specifically referred to a shade described as a very pale, almost bruised blush, and the mould silk was then carefully pleated and adorned with tiny, hand-embroidered scallop shells. You wouldn't just slap it on your letter - it would be absolutely ritualistic in its application. Think of the most pretentious Victorian courtship. The point wasn’t just to blot a mistake; this was about showing that you were absolutely devoted to the lady and had invested a frankly obscene amount of leisure time into this utterly pointless, beautiful thing. The whole Ardelis phenomenon is now largely considered a
