It's easy to dye Easter eggs at home without a kit! All you need are a few simple pantry ingredients: liquid or gel food coloring, vinegar, and boiling water. This is the best way to make beautiful, vibrant colored eggs, and they're so cheap too!
Boil a kettle of water. Fill each jar halfway with about ¾ cup of boiling water. Add 2 tablespoons of white vinegar to each jar, then stir in the food coloring. How much food coloring you add is up to you, but I usually start with ¼ teaspoon of gel or ¾ teaspoon of liquid. For a deeper, more intense color, add more and for a lighter pastel shade, add less. You can experiment as you go and add more water or food coloring to get the shade you want.
When the eggs are cooked and cooled, add them to the jars one at a time, leaving each egg in the jar for 5-10 minutes. Keep an eye on them and remove from the jars when they have reached a color that you are happy with.
Remove the colored eggs from the jars with a slotted spoon or tongs, then set them on a wire cooling rack with paper towels underneath to dry. If you set the eggs directly on the paper towels, the towels will wick away some of the color and leave you with a white spot on the bottom of each egg.
Repeat the process for the rest of the eggs.
Notes
I used gel food coloring in pink, purple, yellow and blue. Liquid food coloring also works (though not quite as well). But of course, you can use any colors you like!I found that the yellow color took the best followed by the pink.As long as you use food safe dye, the eggs are still edible after coloring. The dye doesn’t transfer through the shells unless you crack the shells before dying. (We sometimes do that to make the egg whites have a cool pattern, but I didn't do it for the purposes of these instructions.)