Iconic 2 Way Marker Pens are great for journaling.

The best pastel highlighters we’ve used aren’t technically highlighters at all. Double-sided Iconic 2 Way Marker Pens are equipped with both bullet tips and highlighter-esque chisel tips to maximize their versatility. Impressively, they did not affect ballpoint, gel, rollerball, pencil, inkjet printing, or even fountain pen ink in our smearing tests. They dry within four seconds on Rhodia paper. Although they do exhibit mild bleeding on copy paper, we think their lack of smudging more than makes up for that.

Different combinations of specific pens, inks, and paper can be more or less likely to smudge. We recommend testing any highlighter with your specific materials before you use them on anything important. You can see which pens and paper we used in our tests in the Test Results section.

Iconic 2 Way Marker Pens come in sets of five. The Retro and Pastel sets contain lovely soft colors like Lime Yellow, Brownie Pink, and Warm Gray. Their interesting hues make them especially good for drawing embellishments and headers, while their fine tips are handy for filling in habit trackers in bullet journals and planners.

• Pastel Highlighter Recommendations
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Books
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Color-Coding
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Handwritten Notes
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for the Kid at Heart
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Long Study Sessions
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Minimalists
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Precision
  • The Best Pastel Highlighters for Print-Outs
• Swatch Comparison
• Test Results
• Compare These Highlighters
• How We Approach Research & Testing
• Shop This Post
• Conclusion

Pilot FriXion Light Natural & Soft Color Highlighters don't bleed through absorbent paper.

If highlighting key concepts helps you get more out of books, try FriXion Highlighters. Their restrained flow stops them from soaking through absorbent book pages. Like other FriXion pens, these highlighters “erase” with heat, or friction. This means that you can easily remove their marks when you’ve finished analyzing a book. We’ve found that rubbing highlighted sections to erase the ink doesn’t lighten the underlying text, but the paper may show slight discoloration and wrinkling.

The Pilot FriXion Light Highlighters come in two pastel versions: Soft Color and Natural. The Soft Color highlighters come in six hues that are even gentler than most other pastel highlighters so they don’t distract from your reading. The Natural ones are somewhat bolder, making them a good option for those who find the Soft Color ones a little too muted.

Zebra Mildliners are available in lots of colors.

Color-coding notes and planning entries help you quickly recognize related topics and organize your thoughts. Mildliners are fantastic for this. They come in a wide selection of “mild” hues—twenty-five in all—that encompasses classic colors like Mild Yellow as well as uncommon shades like Mild Smoke Blue and Mild Magenta. This assortment lets you color-code your notes with a tastefully unified palette, a few favorite colors, or a rainbow of all twenty-five shades.

In addition to the standard chisel tip version, Zebra Mildliners are also available as double-sided highlighter brush pens! These delightful brush highlighters are great for lettering with your favorite highlighter colors.

Marvy PastelLiner Highlighters work well with written notes.

If you write your notes out by hand and highlight them, you probably know what it’s like to see your careful work marred by unsightly smudges. Marvy PastelLiner Highlighters help prevent such damage. They did not smear ballpoint, gel, rollerball, or pencil at all in our tests. They did smear fountain pen ink slightly, but not enough to impair legibility. If you take notes with fountain pens and want to avoid all smearing, try Iconic Marker Pens. Ink formulas vary, so it’s a good idea to test any highlighter against your specific pens before you use it on anything important. You can see what materials we used in our Test Results section below.

Marvy PastelLiner Highlighters come in six colors and are especially good for long study sessions due to twin rubber grip patches that make them comfortable to hold. Their caps do not post, however, so they may not be best if you're known to lose pen caps. Staedtler Textsurfer Classic Pastel Highlighters and Staedtler Triplus Textsurfers are good alternatives. Epoch Kobaru Sweet Tapir Scented Highlighters performed just as well with written notes as the Marvy and Staedtler highlighters but their caps also do not post.