Last Updated on January 2, 2022
A change is coming to Crayola’s famous 24-pack: the company is planning to switch out one of the colors just in time for National Crayon Day.
UPDATE: On Thursday, Crayola announced “Dandelion” is the color being retired. As you can see below, it was one of the colors I listed as a good choice for retirement because it seemed redundant. Here’s the original post:
If you were going to toss out a perfectly good color, which would you choose?
That’s the decision executives at Crayola are set to make on Friday, which is National Crayon Day. The crayon maker is dropping a color from its famous 24-pack. But they’ll replace that color with a different hue so you’ll still be buying two dozen.
When the big announcement is made Friday morning, whichever color gets the axe will no longer be made. (Seems a bit harsh to me: there are bigger box sizes you’d think they could include the color in.)
WPIX-TV listed the colors in a current 24-pack:
Right now, the 24-count box has red, yellow, blue, brown, orange, green, violet, black, carnation pink, yellow orange, blue green, red violet, red orange, yellow green, blue violet, white, violet red, dandelion, cerulean, apricot, scarlet, green yellow, indigo and gray.
Of those colors, if I had to drop one, I’d be initially tempted to select apricot, which you’d think isn’t that common a color until you actually look at it, then you’re quickly reminded that apricot is very similar to flesh tone, which makes it a fairly useful color.
But looking over that list, another choice comes to mind: do kids really need “yellow green” and “green yellow”? It seems to me they could just easily compromise and remove one of those colors, especially the “green yellow” color which sounds more awkward than “yellow green.” In any case, the midpoint between yellow and green has its own name: chartreuse. Unfortunately, in Crayola world, Yellow Green is a very pale light green, while Green Yellow is a very pale yellow, and not a particularly attractive color in my book.
But still: either ought to be enough.
The same could be true for the combinations red violet and violet red. Red Violet looks like magenta, which isn’t its own color. But Violet Red is pink, which is already in the box, although their pink, according to Crayola’s website, is a dull rose.
The color dandelion seems redundant, too, since they already have yellow and yellow orange. Dandelion and yellow look very, very similar.
If it were up to me, I’d probably drop what they call “pink,” since their pink isn’t that pretty a pink to begin with.
There were a lot of redundant colour’s in there, such as the two dark violet shown in the telly clipping; or the three dark blues. I agree that one of the two, yellow-green or green-yellow, needs to go, but personally, it’s the latter I’d kick off. Yellow is a primary color, not green. Without a white crayon to lighten the darker colour’s (which seem to dominate in the twenty-four pack), one needs the lighter yellow.
I started out as a kid using Crayola crayons, but in the largest pack size possible. And to this day, I still buy my fancy art pencils, which is my favorite medium, in the 250 shades, rather than anything else.