✨ Natural Earth Paint: small, woman-owned Oregon company making kids’ paint, face paint and eco glitter from earth and mineral pigments. Made in the USA.

🍃 Children’s Earth Paint ingredients (as listed by Natural Earth Paint): organic corn starch, gum arabic (tree sap), natural earth and mineral pigments. Colors: Venetian red, orange ochre, yellow ochre, terre verte, ultramarine blue, raw umber. Just add water.

🍃 Natural Face Paint ingredients (as listed by Natural Earth Paint): distilled water, natural clay and mineral pigments, organic castor seed oil, certified organic beeswax, certified organic shea nilotica (fair-trade shea butter), glycerin (from coconut oil), cetearyl alcohol (from vegetable oils), carrageenan (seaweed), Olive-mulse (an olive-based emulsifier), 1% Optiphen (preservative).

🍃 Eco Glitter (as described by Natural Earth Paint): a cellulose core and natural coating made from hardwoods, mainly eucalyptus. Natural Earth Paint does not publish a full ingredient list for the glitter.

✅ The Good: The kids’ paint is just three ingredients, corn starch, tree sap and earth pigments, and carries the ACMI AP nontoxic seal. The face paint is mostly plant, mineral and beeswax based and is third-party tested for heavy metals.

💚 Progress Over Perfection: The face paint jars have plastic lids (Natural Earth Paint lists the jars as recyclable plastic), and the paint kit pouches are plastic too. Normally that would keep a product off our site. We gave this one a pass because it goes on children’s faces and skin, and we’d rather kids wear paint made from clay, minerals and plant oils than petroleum-based face paint in a nicer container. We make the same call for pet food. The blue in the paint kit is ultramarine, which today is normally made in a lab from minerals rather than dug from the ground. The face paint uses Optiphen, a lab-made preservative blend (mainly phenoxyethanol) at 1% to keep it free of bacteria, and it is not vegan because of the beeswax.

📦 Packaging: Paint kit: 100% post-consumer recycled paper box, with paint pouches the brand describes as biodegradable “plastic”. Face paint: recyclable plastic jars. Glitter: recyclable aluminum tins.

✨ Honeysticks: New Zealand family brand making beeswax crayons, finger paints and watercolors for toddlers and kids, with no paraffin wax.

🍃 Beeswax Crayons ingredients (as listed by Honeysticks): 100% pure beeswax and FDA-approved food-grade pigments for color. Same for Originals, Jumbos, Super Jumbos and Triangles. Honeysticks does not name the individual pigments.

🍃 Finger Paints and Watercolors (as described by Honeysticks): Honeysticks describes the finger paint as a water-based, vegan, gluten-free formula with cosmetic-grade, food-safe ingredients, and the watercolors as made with food-grade and cosmetic-grade colors, but does not publish a full ingredient list for either.

✅ The Good: The crayons are beeswax, a natural by-product of honey making, instead of the petroleum paraffin wax most crayons are made from.

💚 Progress Over Perfection: Honeysticks doesn’t say which food-grade pigments it uses. Food-grade colors can be lab-made dyes (like FD&C lake dyes), so we can’t tell you they are plant- or mineral-based. Without full lists for the paints, we can’t check what else is in them.

📦 Packaging: Honeysticks says all its packaging is recyclable and the Originals crayons are 100% plastic-free. Finger paints come in pots made from 100% reclaimed plastic inside a PEFC-certified cardboard box. Watercolors come in a recyclable metal tin.