Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Okay, I was not expecting Prismacolor or a dupe for high end pencils here. I was looking for decent colored pencils with good color payoff for sketching and whatever that I didn't have to be too precious about. These are under forty dollars for a reason. However I noticed right away there are problems with this set and after doing a lot of swatching I feel like other potential buyers should know about them: if I had I might have considered something else, or a smaller set. A significant number of the colors are just... not right. I know there are some colors that are kind of a matter of opinion: turquoise seems to be one of them, aqua, things like "apple green". There are colors that are just made up, like "mimosa", so I'm not going to quibble with those. But I am going to take issue with things like "cyan blue" being straight up green, "indigo" and "cerulean" being purple (and the same color purple at that), "bronze" being copper, "dark olive green" being brown, "steel blue" being essentially "powder blue" and "powder blue" being the exact same color as "aqua". Sapphires are not green, chocolate is not red, amber isn't bright orange, and "Dodger blue", a trademarked color I believe, is not the same as "dark turquoise" which is not Primary Blue. I'm from Los Angeles, I know Dodger Blue, okay? "Tawny yellow" isn't olive green, "Sand brown" isn't peachy orange. And if there wasn't already several peachy oranges and instead there was a Sand Brown with a different name, hey, I'd be cool, I'd just ignore the names, but instead it seems like there's a lot of padding in this set. Also, look, some of the color names have me slightly concerned. Why is "Cream" a bright acid green? What's going on with the dairy industry over there? That is worrisome, especially since I really would have loved a cream colored pencil, and this ain't it, I hope. Oh yeah, and "Maroon" and "Dark Maroon" are IDENTICAL. "Dark gray" is literally two shades lighter than just plain "Gray", so there's that kind of mislabeling. Also that "Gray" is identical to "Dark Moss Green", which was the first color to clue me in that there is something off here. I wish this set did have a dark moss green. Then there are the metallics. Is there a reason, first of all, that no one makes metallic red or metallic orange or even a true metallic green? How about a Metallic White, or Black, or Champagne? Instead we have the padding situation again: for some reason there's a "Metallic Ochre", which is not at all ochre, and a "Metallic Khaki" (WHY), and they are the same color, which is just shy of bronze but fails to get there in the end. There is a "Metallic Steel Blue" and "Metallic Dark Blue", which are the same color. "Metallic Rose Gold" isn't rose gold, it's almost identical to the "Metallic Violet". There's some misnaming again too-- "Metallic Forest Green" is basically peridot, it's not even close to a traditional forest green. And there's not much metallic going on here. I don't care so much about metallics, I always think they're kind of a waste of time, but if you're looking for metallic looking metallics you're not gonna find them here. They show up on black paper, but so do some of the non-metallics. In fairness I don't find the Prismacolor metallics to be that great either in terms of shine, but at least they just made six basic colors and didn't waste my time pretending there were twelve. I would have preferred to give this a two and a half stars, because it's kind of just right in the middle. The box is great. I don't like the trays but they kept the pencils safe in transit, and other people might like them. The pencils have decent color as long as your paper has a little tooth-- on smooth paper they're okay, not bad, not great, but with more tooth they definitely have good color. The leads are not soft, not stupid hard. I don't know how they blend because that's not my style but messing around with them makes me think they could be blended somewhat. I'm going to keep them but I can't recommend them just because of all the weirdness. Next time I'll get a smaller set because there's too many repeats and overlaps. If you have kids you could split this set into two or three and they'd have pretty much the same set except for a few colors, so there's a thought. It's not like they couldn't have made 160 colors. I literally would have been delighted with an actual "Sand Brown" or "Rose Gold" or, you know, CYAN. There are factually more than 160 colors in existence, but for some reason they cut corners, or got people on board who can't tell the difference between maroon and dark maroon etc., and didn't make 160 colors. So go with a smaller set, which is what I'll do in the future, unless you want a bunch of repeated colors with different names. One big positive I have to mention here: There's a color in this set called "Dark Lividity". Kudos to whoever named this, because first of all "livid" is actually a color. That's the orgin of the word for being really angry-- being so angry your face goes black and blue. And the color is great. I like me a good neutral dark. I'd love to have a lipstick this color. I wish there was a duplicate of this one in the set lol.