With Easter coming up a friend who knows I like odd ways of doing things sent me an unusual method of dying eggs. Only three things needed; eggs, food coloring and shaving cream. Yup, shaving cream. The instructions said that it produced swirls of color rather than plain or striped eggs. Naturally I had to try it. And because dying eggs is more fun with kids, not to mention shaving cream being fun to play with, I enlisted two of my nieces as test dyers.
The original directions were simple.
1 – Spread cheap white shaving cream in a cookie sheet.
2 – Apply drops of food coloring across the surface.
3 – Use toothpicks to swirl the colors around.
4 – Roll the cooled hardboiled eggs around in the colored cream.
5 – Allow the color to set for three or four minutes.
6 – Wipe off the shaving cream with a paper towel.
7 – Rinse.
My recommendation up front is also to avoid scented shaving cream. Menthol may be manly but it will also permeate an eggshell. Menthol flavored eggs simply cannot belong to Easter morning. Blech.
I did not manage pictures of the dying stages. To start with the one year old was not content to paddle around in the plain white shaving cream and kept making bids for one hand in each of her sisters’ colors and had to be cleaned up and, despite all protests, confined to the floor.
Then miss six who decided the shaving cream was too icky to touch. Normally she’s not a neat freak. She will cheerfully stick her hands in tuna salad to make sure the pickles are distributed evenly or smooth pizza sauce with her fingers. So refusing to touch shaving cream? Seriously?
By the time I’d fished out forks for her to roll the eggs around with both girls had plunked an egg in their artwork. Finally, neither of them dared move an egg to a paper towel, either, because the shaving made them slippery so aunty ended up doing transport duty. Pulling out the camera was a matter of repeatedly washing up and what fun is that?
The first discovery we made was that swirling the color with a toothpick creates lovely delicate patterns in the shaving cream. The six year old excelled at this. Her shaving cream was a masterpiece of swirls and squiggles. She carefully rolled her eggs around with the fork and came up with this.
None of the artistic swirls transferred to her eggs. They all ended up green, although with some interesting patterns of light and darker green except one that had little grey dots all over it. We tried to replicate it, but it seemed to be a one shot effect. I recommend wider swirls, say with a butter knife.
Her four year old sister simply blobbed food coloring any which way and called it good. Miss four also noticed that the shaving cream makes cool waves when you drop an egg into it. So she wanted to stand on the chair and see what happens when she stretched as high as she can reach. We may try that outside this summer with plain shaving cream and something less breakable than eggs.
She didn’t carefully roll the eggs around, either. She just swished a bit, turned the egg over to swish the other side in a different patch of food color, and called it good.
Totally different effect.
The last thing we learned was that three or four minutes was not enough for the color to set. After four minutes the color was pale and washed out. It took ten minutes to get vibrant hues. I suspect the difference is in the type of food color used, I’ve noticed saturation differences between brands before. At any rate the shaving cream method worked! And it was much more fun than dipping the eggs into cups of dye. Here are the final results.
