Coloring Eggs With Natural Dyes – Brown Eggs vs White Eggs {an experiment}

We love family traditions. Everyone looks forward to our traditional Easter breakfast! Each year we serve homemade Crumb Cake (Grandma Brown’s recipe) and colored hard-boiled eggs.

Some years we keep it simple and just buy food dye from the store to color our eggs. The table is lined with little cardboard boxes with holes, and cups with bright vinegary liquid. But other years we make the dyes ourselves.

This year we decided to make our own dyes again. We thought we’d try a little experiment while we were at it, and dye both brown and white eggs.  Some people dye eggs naturally by boiling the raw eggs in the dye solution. But we want to be able to cool dip, so that is what these recipes are for.

First you need hard-boiled eggs. A few weeks ago we shared our method for perfect hard-boiled eggs. Boil some up then rapid-cool them before you dye.

You can also dye eggs that you have blown out. But don’t try to eat them! 😉

We were so engrossed in the dipping that we didn’t take any pictures of the actual dyeing process. Oops! But here is what it looked like before we started. We kept it simple – 8 oz jelly jars, 2/3 filled with dye (some of those jars below were too full) and a spoon to gently lower and raise the eggs.

Be sure to cover your table with something you don’t mind getting stained. Your body too!

We have used different recipes over the years – it’s kind of an ongoing trial and error project. Decide for yourself which dyes and which eggs make the cut this year. We think some of them came out very pretty! But there were definitely a few fails.

Pink Eggs

How to: We boiled 4 cups of water, added a chopped up beet, then 2 tablespoons of white vinegar.

Verdict: Nope. This one was a big flop. We got pink nicely one year, too bad we can’t find that recipe.

Orange Eggs

How to: Boil 1 cup of water, add the peels of 3 yellow onions and simmer 15 minutes. Add 2 teaspoons of white vinegar.

Verdict: Pretty! We really like how this came out on both the white and brown egg. Kind of like planets.

Yellow Eggs

How to: Boil 1 cup of water, stir in 2 tablespoons of turmeric, then add 2 teaspoons of white vinegar.

Verdict: This was a definite win for the white egg, the brown egg was okay, but not stunning.

Green Eggs

How to: Boil 1 cup of water, add the peels of 3 red onions and simmer 15 minutes. Add 2 teaspoons of white vinegar. Yep, we thought this was kind of a funny way to make green too but we saw this recipe in several places, so we gave it a shot. And got the results we anticipated…

Verdict: Flop! Not even close! It just made the white egg look like a brown egg! We have yet to find a natural green dye recipe that actually comes out green. Any ideas for us? Fallback –  a green egg straight from the hen. 🙂

We’re pretty sure the only way to get a reliable natural light green is to use an egg from an Ameraucana chicken.

Blue Eggs

How to make blue dye: Boil 4 cups of water, add 1/4 red cabbage then 2 tablespoons of white vinegar.

This is what the liquid looked like before the vinegar was added…

… and after. Cool, eh?

Verdict: This was kind of a weird one. In the past we’ve had great success dying with red cabbage. Isn’t it whacky what happened to the liquid when we added vinegar? The white egg did come out pretty but it took forever (2 hours?) I (Mrs. Brown) got impatient with the brown egg and added extra vinegar. That was a bad idea, as you can see from the brown egg. While a layer of dye did appear to be laid down, it peeled off! Abbie theorizes that the vinegar was so intense it actually started stripping the shell. Maybe. In any case, the verdict is that we want to find our old recipe! And the white egg with blue is nice, it just takes a long time.

Lavender Eggs

How to: This one is ridiculously easy. Just add 1 tablespoon of vinegar to 1 cup of purple grape juice! No cooking.

Verdict: This is the one that had us all oohing and ahhing. The pictures don’t really do it justice, but the supposedly lavender dye on the white egg was stunning. It came out a deep nighttime blue with sparkles! It was like a starry night! The brown was nothing special, but the white, wow!

Overall verdict on brown vs white:
We generally preferred the way the white eggs took the dye, but the rich rust red of the orange-dyed brown egg is a keeper.

Next year’s repeats will be:
orange dye, brown egg
orange dye, white egg
yellow dye, white egg
no dye, green Ameraucana egg 😉
blue dye, white egg
lavender dye, white egg

Still on the lookout for reliable:
red dye
pink dye
purple dye
green dye

Do you have a tried and true recipe for natural egg dye?
Please help us in our quest for a lovely egg rainbow, and share it in the comments!