BIC® 4-Color™ Pen

Do you know someone who is obsessed with this pen?

Jan 28, 2026

If you’ve watched the 2024 filmed adaptation of the 2018 Trent Dalton novel Boy Swallows Universe (Netflix) you may have noticed the young hero Eli’s BIC® 4-Color™ pen making an appearance in his clenched writing hand from time to time.

Netflix *Boy Swallows Universe* Episode 4: “Boy Loses Dad” at 00:46:10

The BIC 4-Color pen was created in 1970 and was meant to serve and stimulate French students’ writing by providing four colours in one pen. While seen as a novelty at first, people soon realised the utility of packaging four colours into one.

The pen was made to be affordable and, in those days, disposable. The first advertisement in France boasted “4 colours for only 3 francs”.

The “4C” had a little white ball at the top, representing the famous “Bic boy” head, from the trademark. In the 1970s it was used to dial the numbers on the old rotary phones. These days there’s a hole in that head, for use on a lanyard.

BIC founder Marcel Bich in 1953 > One of the early French ads for the BIC 4-Color pen > BIC Boy in the BIC registered trademark > The hole for lanyard is relatively new.

The pen is a favourite among students and nurses, who use different colours on medical charts for each shift.

Fixated on the pen as an industrial design object, journalist Rick Marin, researching for his piece “Just a Pen, you say? Not to Bic Boy” in The New York Times in 2000, tried to find out who invented it. The BIC people were not helpful. They cited only an “internal team”. He then quotes Donald Albrecht, a guest curator at the National Design Triennial at Cooper-Hewitt:

“Trying to reclaim the history of these things is really hard. The brand becomes the designer, and the company forgets after a while who designed its products.”

Marin’s article is an homage to the pen. He writes:

“My pen is my life. Literally. Bic’s four-color ballpoint is the organizing principle of my day-planner diary: blue for work-related entries; red for personal; black for illness, public appearances and acts of God; green for miscellaneous ‘creative projects’. Much more than just a pen, it’s my Palm Pilot.” [Ed: Remember those?]

Here in Australia, Dr Mark Nethercote, a consultant paediatrician in Ballarat, Victoria opines in a 2017 piece for The Sydney Morning Herald:

“The ultimate joy in a four-pen is that it’s non-conformist yet reliable, honest and faithful. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. It is a pen for the visual in all of us. I hadn’t quite understood until now, but it embodies the exact values I’m trying to instil in my own young family. I guess that’s why I have 20 of them in my bag, ready to go, at any one time.”

Finally, some French school children have become obsessed with the pens. A collection craze of 4C limited editions (a relatively new product development) has led to theft and trading. “The four-colour pen from BIC has always seen strong infatuation from French schoolchildren,” says Astrid Canevet, European communication director for BIC in a 2022 issue of French news website The Connexion.

Does all of this make you want to go out and buy one?