Having kids means having crayons all over the freaking place. People don't give much thought to the crayons they get but enjoying a good coloring session with my daughter means dealing with the breadth and depth of crayon industry and either enjoying or hating the experience.
Today I will review the 3 main brands available at Dollar Tree. This review is mainly for my sake but I thought I'd share in the fun.
Here we go:
The king of crayons is of course Crayola brand. At Dollar Tree you get 16 of these bad boys for a buck. Playskool is next up at a whopping 26 crayons for a dollar and finally Jot brand blows it out with 48 crayons! Playskool is known for many things but crayons is not one of them. They have been producing toys forever but I guess as many companies do, they license their brand to companies that make other things. Jot is the main brand of most of Dollar Tree's office supplies. Let's look at the different Red crayons first:
Both Crayon and Playskool go through the effort of naming the crayons and giving them the appropriate colored wrapping. Jot doesn't even bother. I guess this is where you are saving money. All the Jot crayons have a orange-ish color wrapping with no color names. In order to find 'Red' I had to compare 3 different colors that I though were close to red to find it. So that's a little bit of a bummer but does it really matter in the long run? Proly not. Let's draw a line:
We have Crayola ontop, followed by Playskool, and finally on bottom is Jot. At this point I am surprised at how well Jot is performing. I am figuring out that the cheaper the crayon is, the more waxy chunks are left behind. Crayola has the fewest, then Jot and finally Playskool. My next picture shows this in greater detail:
The Crayola brand (left) has a nice coverage and deep color, the Playskool is a hot mess that just smears the way around with not real coverage and finally Jot does a nice job but the color isn't as deep. Way to go Jot! Here are the same tests in blue:
Same results as the red crayon. So my summary:
Crayon is still the tops and a close 2nd place is Jot! The colors are not a rich but they will do just fine. The only other issue I have with Jot is the fragility of the crayons. The Playskool brand can be chunked in the trash. The wax is cheap or something. I realize they are 'washable' so maybe that's why they aren't as good, but any crayon is washable if you think about it. I won't mention that Playskool has asbestos in them or something...
Jot must be able to afford to make such a great deal with the savings of not printing the names on the crayons or having colored wrappers. Jot has a sharpener built in as well!
