Shaving Cream Dyed Easter Eggs

This year, my kids and I dyed our Easter eggs with food coloring and foam shaving cream.

It was messy, fun, and my two oldest already told me they wanted me to do it again.

The process was easier than I expected, and I already had foam shaving cream because I bought (from the dollar store) several after we discovered the dough we could make from it.

I hope you read on about this easy, fun and messy way to dye Easter eggs.

There are only really two "ingredients" to dye eggs this way, and the rest are items I hope you have in your kitchen.

We did this activity outside for easy clean-up (with the water hose) and I had my children change their shirts to ones they could get food coloring on, just in case there was shaving cream flying around for any reason.

Materials we used:

• food coloring
• foam shaving cream, one can should be sufficient (gel-type will not work)
• wooden skewers (or plastic knives) to move the food coloring around
• hard-boiled eggs (we dyed nine)
• glass dishes (I have three kids and each one of them had his/her own)
• empty egg carton or paper plates with paper towels to hold eggs while drying
• many paper towels

A couple hints:
You could probably use metal pans, if that's all you had, but I didn't want to have any rust stains get the eggs colored on accident.
We covered our work space with a dollar store tablecloth for easy clean-up.

So keeping in mind that this is a fun, messy activity for the kiddos, I sprayed the shaving cream into each of their glass dishes and let them have fun with it.

After a few minutes, I scraped off the shaving cream from my kids hands into their dish, to the best of my ability.  It sticks to your hands so I wiped it on the side of the dish.

At some point, the shaving cream needs to be flattened into a layer on the bottom of the pan, but it doesn't have to be perfectly flat by any means.

I sprayed some more shaving cream into the emptier spaces in the larger dish without moving it, to get to the next step.

We were outside, so my kiddos rinsed their hands using the hose - always a simple fun thing to do in itself.

I helped my three-year old drop the food coloring onto the top of the shaving cream.

I also only allowed my kids to pick three colors for his/her respective dish.  Too many colors mixed together seems to create brown.

The hard part for my four-year old was controlling the amount of drops in one spot, but eventually, she figured out that a slight squeeze creates a controlled drop.

Using the wooden skewers, the kids moved the shaving cream around the dish.

I'm guessing this would work with plastic knives as well.

The artwork created in the dish was fun in itself.

This step is just to slightly stir up the colors so that when the egg is rolled around, it picks up different colors in different streaks and swirls.

My boys somehow mixed the colors up in their dishes while rolling the eggs around in it.

My daughter though understood how to roll the egg so that her mixture was still in different colors after all three of her eggs were dipped into the shaving cream to dye them.

We did a little video on it just for giggles.  It's only 30-seconds long.

We placed the eggs in an empty egg carton lined with a paper towel.

We waited only 10-minutes, and I'd like to think that if we had waited ten more minutes the colors would have been more vibrant.

Ours came out beautiful, but pastel in color.

We cleaned up our messy area, washed hands and played.

The color got a chance to soak into the shell, and as I explained in the previous step, I think if we had waited another ten minutes, (for a total of twenty) the shells would have soaked up a more vibrant color.

The different colors swirled around on the egg, and when it was wiped off, it looked almost nothing like what the shaving cream looked like on the outside.

Take a paper towel and wipe off the shaving cream dye until the egg is smooth.

I told my kids that they couldn't eat these eggs.  That made them sad but they have shaving cream and I certainly am not going to risk it.
We plan on hiding them on Easter day so their currently in our fridge until then.

Have fun friends and I hope you get to try this at least once.  We might just do this during the year for more giggles....