Dyeing Easter Eggs with Shaving Cream

Our family loves egg dyeing. Over the years, we've done the traditional vinegar dye bath method, but we've also experimented with a variety of other techniques too. I highly recommend trying rice dyeing, which was really fun. Or contact paper masks, spray mists, stamping and hand-painting. They all worked beautifully. I don't recommend glue-resist, at least not the way I did it.

This year, we tried coloring our eggs using a marbling technique with shaving cream and food color.

Dyeing Easter Eggs with Shaving Cream and Food Color

Materials: 

• pie pan
• plastic knife
• shaving cream
• food color
• toothpick
• eggs

Steps:

Fill the pie pan with shaving cream. Use the knife to smooth the top somewhat. 

Drip a few drops of food color to the shaving cream. Drag the toothpick through the color to get a marble effect. Do not overmix!

Roll the egg in the shaving cream to get color on each side. 

Place dyed eggs on a rack to let the color set. Refresh the shaving cream and food color as needed. We found we could get about three eggs from the dye before it was too mixed. 

We experimented with rinsing the shaving cream off the eggs right away, letting it sit awhile and then rinsing, and allowing the shaving cream to dry completely before rinsing. There was some benefit to letting the eggs sit awhile before rinsing them, but not much. No matter when we rinsed them, the bold colors washed off and we were left with pastel marbling. 

Nothing wrong with that, of course. They are beautiful! 

To see if we could preserve the bright colors, we also experimented with wiping the shaving cream off the eggs instead of rinsing it off. I don't recommend it. Not only do the eggs smell like shaving cream, but the shell has a slimy texture after being refrigerated and the color we were trying to preserve came off on our hands. We'll stick with pastel eggs.