Pencil Brands Are Lying to You About Being Lightfast

I've spent the past six months watching my pencils fade, and now it's time to show you what I discovered. But this isn't just a simple fade test. I've researched all the different approaches to find the most accurate way to measure how pencils fade over time. And I've been recording the slow progress of every color every few weeks to see which brands fade the fastest, which brands fade after some time, and which brands don't fade at all. I found a very distinct pattern. Really? In every brand that faded, consistently the same color faded first across the board. Oh, you got to tell me. I've done a lot of art supply comparisons over the past few years, but there's been one thing that I have never been able to test because it takes too long, and that's lightfastness. Lightfastness tells us how much a color will fade over time when it is exposed to light. There's nothing more disappointing for an artist than to pour hours or days into a piece of work only to have it fade a few months later. So I want to find out how much does this matter for the average hobby artist and whether some of the more affordable pencils are any different to the more expensive brands when it comes to their lightfastness rating. I've had these color swatches in the sunlight for over 200 days, and I can tell you already without even looking yet, I know some of these results will be crazy different to each other. I've also noticed a recent trend of cheaper pencil brands advertising that their pencils are lightfast, and I've seen some excited reviews and comments from people who think we finally have a more affordable alternative to artist grade pencils that won't fade. I can tell you now, I'm not convinced. And I think there's some sneaky marketing happening here, which I plan to explore during these tests. I know I'm not the first person to test for lightfastness. There have been many artists before me that have tested some swatches of different art supplies over months or even years to see how they have changed. But here's why this test is different. I started this whole process by researching the different ways to perform an official lightfast test and have found a way to not only see how much these pencils fade on my window, but to compare them against the industry standard blue wool testing process, which I'll come back to a little later. During that research, I also found some things that might make lightfast testing far more complicated than I first expected. First, different pigments fade at different rates. So testing just one color from a brand makes it impossible to know if a whole brand is better or worse than a competing brand. So I need to swatch a variety of colors from each different company. And that's a lot of swatches. Second, the amount of sun, temperature, time of year, humidity and the time of day will all change how these results fade. So I need some kind of control to compare against each swatch to account for the differences in my testing compared to corporate testing in a giant, expensive machine. And third, most colors won't fade at a steady rate. Some will fade within the first few weeks, then slow down fading. Others will seem lightfast for months and suddenly start to fade at a later date. And some will fade gradually over time. And there's no way to accurately compare this without taking regular measurements of each sample. So I need a way to accurately record each color at each stage. For that process, I don't just want to rely on my eyesight or even taking photos of each stage. So I found a way to accurately capture every color in a database, measuring it again every two weeks and writing in the new data. And by the end, I'll be able to mathematically and hopefully accurately measure the exact changes in every color on my giant set of swatches. Because, you know, if I'm doing this, I'm really doing this. You're doing the Lord's work. You know that, right? I mean, this is this is really, really important stuff. What you're doing is so scientific and so consistent. I am gobsmacked that the colored pencils, I would have never thought that they would have, not in six months, you know, I would have thought maybe 10 years, maybe, but not six months. That's that's crazy. Before I even get close to testing these swatches, I need to actually prepare the swatches. That means a lot of ruling and a lot of swatching. I've chosen an archival paper for the pencils so that I don't accidentally accelerate the fading further with other factors. And I've chosen 12 main colors from each of my brands to hopefully give us a good range of colors to test and compare. I've tried to include as many of the most popular pencil brands as I can, and I've allowed space for three swatches of each color, one to be tested against the sunlight, one as a control that will live in a dark drawer in my studio, and a third that I'll swatch at the very end of this whole process just in case our control also fades over the next few months. This was supposed to be the easy part, but I have been swatching pencils for over six hours and I haven't even started on the markers that I also wanted to include in this test. I think I've got two pages left and I've made so many mistakes on this page. The color's wrong and that happened again here. And then I've got here and I've rubbed them out and realized that I've written them wrong again. I can't feel the tip of my finger right now. I've done so many swatches in the last three days, and so like I can feel this, but this is like numb and it's been numb for the last three days straight. OK, the markers were a lot quicker and easier to swatch. And by the end of all of this, I had a beautiful array of colors that felt like an art piece in itself, an art piece that is about to be slowly destroyed over time. I have two things I need to do. First of all, we need to cut all of these in half so that we can actually put one half away, put the other half on the window and start this whole thing. But before I do that, I want to get an accurate measurement of the current colors as they are. And for that, I have a special tool. This is the NYX Mini 3 Color Scanner. You can use it to scan the color of any item, giving you the digital hex code reference number that you can use to recreate that color. You can scan your art, your furniture, your clothes, or even your cat. I'm using it today to give us a measurable number that we can use to see just how much these colors are going to change as they fade. Every few weeks, I'll be measuring what each of these colors currently are and recording all that data in a spreadsheet. So by the end, I won't just be trying to assess all these changes by eye. I'll be able to mathematically work out exactly how much they have changed. It's been two weeks. I would hope that not much has changed in two weeks, but I can already see just at a quick glance, there are some colors that are pretty faint already. We did come across a few problems straight away. First of all, the Blu-Tack melted on day one. So I've upgraded to some 3M Velcro and we've had a few strays falling off and the rest of these didn't work as well. Wait a second. No, just that one. OK, that one, I didn't take the backing off the double-sided sticky tape. So that one's on me. But the rest, they have come unstuck from the heat. So hopefully they can handle the rest of the time that they're going to be up on the window. Remember how I mentioned earlier about the industry standards for lightfast testing? So a lot of brands do their own in-house testing and claim on their pencil boxes that they are highly lightfast. But there are only two types of lightfast tests that are officially recognized as an industry standard acceptable test for colored pencils. The first is called the ASTM D6901. This is managed by the American Society of Testing and Materials and was specifically designed for testing colored pencils with their wax or oil-based cores. This uses a sunlight test and a xenon arc test to simulate the effects of sun exposure. Then allocates each pencil with a score between one and five, with one being the very best lightfastness and five being the worst. To be considered lightfast by this standard, pencils must score a one or two. And for a set of pencils to be considered lightfast, every pencil must pass the test. The second method is the blue wool scale. With the blue wool test, the swatches of pencils are exposed to light at the same time as a sample of wool that has been dyed with different blue pigments that have each been designed to fade at very specific times. So regardless of how you do your testing, whether it's in all light, no light, whatever, this becomes a consistent second level of control where if you and I did the same test in any other sense, we'd probably have different results because we're in different parts of the world, different light, whatever. This kind of helps to make everything a bit more consistent again. Each of the eight pigments on the blue wool sample are twice as lightfast as the one before it, so they fade in order from top to bottom. And by comparing my own pencil results to my blue wool results, I can then convert this to match industry standard testing using my blue wool results as a calibration or a conversion chart. So instead of just saying this marker fades quicker than this one, I'll be able to fairly accurately work out how well each pencil or marker will perform over time. And I've spoken to Seaton from the Colored Pencil Society of America to find out more about what I can expect from this testing. So we actually use D5380, that's the sunlight exposure test. In the middle here we have the blue wool. So this is what we put this in, put it in there and cover it up. So when this is shut, the sun can't get in there. It's closed very tight. So only this part is exposed to the sun. So when we open it up, you can see that that's only half of the swatch. So your control is right there on the window, just blocked. Right there. We use the third strip here and a month seal card. What we're doing is matching it up. When this third one reaches that color, that's when we know it's time to pull it in. And so when that happens, we pull it in and we have a panel of five people who analyze the results and they're just by eye. We take an average of those five and that's how we get our final result. Maybe I took this way further than I need to. You're getting very technical into it. So, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. So in just two weeks, there are some really distinct changes. Most notably, a lot of the pinks really faded. In some cases, they have completely disappeared. If you love pink, I'm sorry. I don't know why pink is so fugitive in itself. That's a good question. They call them the fugitive colors because they run away. You know, you can't find them. It's the pigments. It's difficult to find pigments of those colors or a blend of pigments that will produce something that remain over the long run. They just fade. And magenta is obviously a really hard pigment to find. Because it's not naturally occurring in nature. The other thing I noticed is the markers faded really quickly. And this is kind of something that I expected, but there were a few little surprises here. Most of these are fading pretty similarly, but the Pantone markers that are new and that are apparently lightfast and that are a water-based marker are holding their ground so far. They have barely changed, which is really impressive. The Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens are also really holding the same color. And I wish I had more of them here to show you some of the other colors. But the real surprise here is actually how well the Crayola Super Tips have held up. Other than the pink, which we know is the first to fade, some of these colors have barely changed. And I'm really impressed. So the two-week results were interesting, but let's see how this goes over a longer period of time. So do you think that lightfastness is important for the average artist? I think lightfastness is absolutely important to anybody who wants to keep their art. There's art that we make that's temporary. There's sketches, stuff that you're doing to get an idea across to somebody else. But I think most artists, there's just a part of us inside of us that says, I want everything I do to be a masterpiece. I want this to be around for a thousand years, and I want it to be in a gallery or something like that. So I think it's the intention of what you're doing with your art, what's your intent with your art. If your intent is for it to be temporary, if your intent is for it to be just a sketch or just to convey an idea, then I think you don't need to worry about lightfastness. Do you think coloring books need lightfastness? No, I think coloring books are the thing that we do to make us happy. It's meditative. It's fun. It's day 200. That is more than six months. And I can finally look at all the data I've gathered and find the answers we've been hoping to find since day one. But I'm not quite finished yet. What I'm planning to do with these controls is actually swatch them again, because one thing that I'm not sure that anyone has tested is what about the ones in the drawer? Will they fade? Now, it's only been six months for me. It's not been like two years, but I was thinking about how we're all testing against these controls. But have we tested the control? Yeah, that's true. That's true. I didn't even think about that. Especially the markers, because markers are prone to fade. And it's like if you keep your art in a drawer, will it actually last or will it still fade? So I want to answer that as well. I spent a whole day reswatching these. And in hindsight, I probably didn't need to because even the least lightfast pencils and markers here didn't change color at all from the original control samples, which meant that this probably was a bit of a waste of time. And I probably could have just spot checked a few of the lowest rated supplies, but the results are great news. The fact that none of these have faded over six months means that keeping your artwork in a drawer or somewhere out of sunlight should help stop it fading, even if you're not using lightfast art supplies. But while we watch me swatching needlessly, let me run you through the full super nerdy process of how I'm planning to actually measure the changes in these colors. To compare my faded colors against the original samples, I'm using a mathematical color matching algorithm known as CIEDE2000. This is the industry standard system for perceptual color matching and is the most accurate way to compare how similar two colors are to the human eye. To do this, I first converted every color to a lab color space. This is a system that represents every color in a 3D space based on how humans perceive them, like a GPS, but for every color that exists. The distance between two colors is measured by something called delta E. If delta E equals zero, the colors are exactly the same. And bigger numbers like a five or a ten means the difference is obvious. So at each stage, I can use this to see just how much each color has faded with a delta score, and I've converted it to a percentage as well, just to make things a little easier to understand. I also calculated how much each pencil faded over the six months as a whole. This percentage isn't any particular industry scoring system. It's just something that I found interesting to look at when comparing how much each color faded at the end of the six months of testing. I also wanted to look at how the blue wool has actually changed. The first two colors have completely disappeared, and the third one is just a tiny bit of color left. And actually, the ones right at the bottom changed a little bit, but not a lot, which kind of makes me want to run this test a bit longer. When it comes to assigning each color with a score on the blue wool scale, I'm not just looking at how much they've faded after six months. Instead, the way this is measured is to identify when each color starts to show noticeable fading compared to the blue wool reference. Humans can usually see even very small changes in color. So the official system used is called a JNF threshold. So if the pencil reaches this threshold, and so does blue wool number three, the pencil ends up with a blue wool score of three. And because I love detail and so many of my samples faded within the first two weeks, I also worked at the fade rate for each of the swatches over the first six weeks to better differentiate between the pencils that faded similar to blue wool one or two or three. In case I lost you. Here's the TLDR. I swatched a bunch of pencils. I watched them fade over six months. I did a bunch of fancy coding and measuring, and I converted my results to match the industry version. So after all of this, I can show you the fading, but I can also tell you what it means for you as a consumer. I'm done. Let's take a look. I found a very distinct pattern. Really? In every brand that faded consistently the same color faded first across the board. Oh, you got to tell me. These pinks, all of these pinks are just gone. There are so many white boxes and there were no white boxes when I started this. And it is consistently in the same spot. You'll see in all my swatches. Let me give you like this one, right? Yeah. There was no white on this swatch. Really? There is a huge pattern of that white section in the same area. What's crazy to me is that that color and even these colors don't feel that different to this one, and yet this one's gone. I decided to group all my results by color to see if there were any other major patterns like this across the board. And just looking at the pencils, the blacks all performed really well. Most of the other colors showed similar patterns with the difference between good or bad light fastness being more about the brand than the specific color. The problem really showed up among the pinks, purples and one specific shade of orange. The darkest purples weren't too bad, but the light to mid purples lost over half of their color on average by the end of the six months. In the same way, the darker oranges held out, but one particular orange faded quickly in seven different brands. And the pinks, some of these didn't just fade, they faded immediately. This was the only color that disappeared completely by week 10 in more than 30 different brands. And by the end, there's hardly any pink left. The neon pinks didn't hold up either. And I honestly wasn't expecting any of the neons to still have as much color as they do. Oh, that wasn't supposed to be a yellow at all. That was an orange. Look how much that's changed. That's not just faded. This one too, that's not just faded. That has changed color. I think this is happening when the color has been created by mixing multiple different pigments, with some of them being more light fast than others. The strangest one is this Marco Raffine pencil that immediately goes from a chocolate brown to more of a greeny brown, then starts changing into more of a blue gray. I think this is the only one that has multiple color shifts like this. The markers were even worse. And so many of these changed color in just the first few weeks. If there's one thing that's clear from all this testing, it's that alcohol markers are not light fast, even the most expensive ones. There were some brands that performed really bad on this light fast test. The Castle Art, Arteza, Shuttle Art, Brute Funer and others in this affordable pencil range all showed us today why they are more affordable. It's because their pigments won't last compared to professional grade colored pencils. And it's many of these pencils that are bragging about their light fast ratings in their advertising. But let's come back to that in a moment. All of the Derwent and the Faber-Castell ranges were above average. And from the most affordable pencils, the Starjoy Gold have proven again that they are great value for money, performing so much better than other pencils in the same price range. The Derwent light fast have not changed at all. The Caran d'Ache just said, nope, we're not going anywhere. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. This shouldn't be a surprise. After all, both these brands have said that all of their pencils are officially tested for the highest possible light fastness. The Faber-Castell Polychromos did fairly well, but not quite as well as the Faber-Castell Gold Faber. The Derwent Chromaflow are also surprisingly good. But the pink, the pink is letting everyone down. We need two categories. Categories of pencils that are pretty light fast and the categories of pencils that are pretty light fast, including the pink. But Crayola might just be the biggest surprise of all here. Crayola, please explain. How is it that the cheap kids Crayola pencils have actually done pretty well in this test? Except the pink. And yet the Crayola signature made for adults. This is one of the worst. Like, what? Why would you spend all the extra money on the Crayola signature when the Crayola cheap kids ones that are like less than five dollars are more light fast? Somebody forged Crayola's signature. A lot of these brands have light fast ratings printed on their pencils, and I have noticed a recent trend of cheaper pencil brands starting to claim that their pencils are highly light fast. And I'm suspicious. Many of these brands are doing their own light fast testing. But since there aren't really any regulations around this, it's a mess of big claims, confusing terminology and misleading results. One particular brand that's been in the spotlight lately is Wuma. I've heard great things about these pencils and I'm yet to try them for myself. But they sent me this pack and I said yes because I was incredibly curious to hear that they were apparently affordable and light fast. They are light fast tested, but that doesn't mean they are light fast. In Wuma's case, they've done a blue wall test, sort of. They're not using the eight blue wall swatches to compare the fading. Instead, they're using this more like a stopwatch. Then they compare the color to grayscale patches and assign a score. But because they stopped the test at blue wall five, they can't accurately rank anything as light fast above this number. Marco have also done light fast testing, following the Chinese guidelines for textiles and using a Zenon lamp like the official ASTM system. This seems thorough and helpful until you notice that they only tested their pencils for less than a day and are only sharing results of a few colors. In my test, both Wuma and Marco weren't any different to the other brands. But since nobody actually regulates this, all these brands can say their pencils are light fast and don't have to prove it. Other companies like Castle Arts, Calor and Arteza have also implemented their own testing systems, but don't tell anyone what their scores are based on. I tried to get answers and I tried to find a way to convert all these different brand scores to a consistent scoring system. And there was just not enough information across the Internet for me to do this. So hopefully, even if the brands aren't being clear, my own testing can help to give you a better cross reference of which brands and which colors are actually light fast. And a quick shout out to the brands like Derwent, Holbein, Faber-Castell and Caran d'Ache, who make their light fast testing results far more transparent and easy to find. Now, this testing was mostly about pencils, but I did test a few markers, mostly just for my own curiosity. Yeah, these are bad. And now, especially with the alcohol markers, I expected these to fade, but I'm still pretty disappointed at the actual results. There's hardly anything left, even the black. The Olo markers have kind of just gone monotone. The permanent markers that are not so permanent. I mean, did anyone actually do OK at this? In the alcohol marker category, they all failed. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy using alcohol markers. It just means that if you're wanting to sell or keep your artwork, you should look into UV protectant sprays or UV glass for displaying your work or take good photos and get prints made and keep your originals hidden away in a drawer. I didn't test many non-alcohol markers, but the Winsor & Newton watercolor markers did seem to hold up and the Pantone markers weren't too bad either. These are really expensive. And one of the reasons is because they say that they are a lightfast marker. Now, compared to every other marker, that seems to be pretty true. But compared to all the other art supplies, even our pencils, they're still not perfect. I was hoping that the Pitt Artist Pens would hold up too, and a few of them did. I just wished I'd tested more colors of these, but all of my other water-based markers faded just as quickly as the alcohol markers. Compared to the Colored Pencil Society standard, do you think that what I've done is... I think it's impressive. When you sent me that email, you know, I wasn't sure exactly how you were doing it. So I think I'm in Sri Lanka. I thought maybe you were sticking them in the window and just eyeballing it. I'm impressed. Like, I think you're OK. I think you're doing it well. I love that we can nerd out about this stuff. This is not as interesting, I'm sure, to the layperson, but... Wait till you see my spreadsheets, I'm telling you. When it comes to finding the most lightfast colored pencils, it's not surprising that the winners are the Caran d'Ache Luminance and the Derwent Lightfast Pencils. These also perform the best in all the other testing that I've done in the past against even more brands than I've tested here. The Faber-Castell Gold Faber, Derwent Chromaflow, Koh-I-Noor Polycolor, Derwent Coloursoft, and the Faber-Castell Polychromos were all exceptional as well. And when it comes to the more affordable brands, the Starjoy Gold outperformed the rest. But if you want to take a closer look at all of this, I've included every result in a blog post on my website with a second whole blog post detailing the crazy rabbit holes I went down in my own nerdy journey to find the most accurate way to do all of this. But for now, there's just one thing left to decide. Am I done or are we putting these back on the wall for another year? Okay, we've finished filming, but I had to add this last comment regarding brands that are just messing up their lightfast testing. I have come across the Kalor Pencils lightfast chart. This is the brand who in the advertising is saying they have unsurpassable lightfastness, but their own ranking system is backwards. And according to this, out of all the pencils that I tested, there is only one that is even lightfast, and it's the pink.