My mind is always abuzz with various imponderables. I’m glad I finally found a site that might be able to answer some of them!
What composites the lead in colored pencils? What is it made of?
basically it is composed of two parts. The first part is Pigment , generally in very fine particles. This is what provides the colours. The second part is the Carrier. It used to be hard waxes, or wax resin copmbinations, and many pencil crayons still use that combo. Other modern choices are plastic based, often polyester based.
The pigments are mixed with the carriers, extruded into cylenders and enclosed in the wood “pencil”
Regards
Welcome aboard sailor! Your comment is wrong. We can answer ALL of them except for a select few questions. Ask away.
According to How It’s Made they use pigments and a mixture of clay and wax as a binder.
And for what it’s worth, even regular non-colored pencils are mostly clay or wax with “pigment” in it. The days of pure graphite being used are mostly behind us.
Thanks guys!
This is the type of site I’ve been looking for for a looong time. All the other question and answer sites have too many of those non-fact based questions, like “who would win in a fight–Chuck Norris or Santa?” It makes it impossible for questions that require real answers (that is, answers that take knowledge to come up with) to get a lot of attention.
Oh, we have areas for that sort of question too. But General Questions is for questions that have fact based answers. And we have an active moderation staff that will move questions that are in the wrong spot, and who will also remove spammers. Cecil or his staff have also answered a lot of questions, and you can try to search the archives. However, our search engine is a bit simple minded, and might not come up with the right column on the first page. But give it a try anyway, there’s some fascinating columns in the archives.
Really? Wouldn’t a wax pencil mark be difficult to remove with an eraser?
It’s not beeswax, psychonaut, but similar substances which coat but do not penetrate the paper. The eraser works by scratching away bits of the paper’s surface: it only needs to scratch off the parts that contain pigment. Try erasing a spot painted with water-based paints: it won’t work, but not because the eraser isn’t doing its job; it won’t work because the pigment has gone a lot deeper than a pencil’s will.