How to dye eggs without food dye?

Question

Easter is coming up and I need to dye eggs (family tradition). I usually use food dye, but I don't have any and I don't want to go out and buy some. I need an alternate way, that won't take long and is easy. I have to dye a dozen eggs, so anything like coloring or painting them will take to long.

How else can I quickly dye eggs for Easter?

@PythonMaster Takes too long. I mentioned that in my question — michaelpri, Apr 04 '15 at 23:31
I really don't know how it could be faster than taking a marker to it. You could have done one in the time it took to post this. — Carl, Apr 05 '15 at 02:22
@Carl This post is not just for my good, but to help anyone else who might have this questions — michaelpri, Apr 05 '15 at 02:25

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 05 '15 at 07:39

We can use any kind of natural vegetable dye sources we may find in our kitchen or garden as egg shells easily take up the color from them.

All natural dyes have in common to boil the eggs together with the vegetables. Some vinegar added as a fixative to the water may help to make the color last longer.

Brown to red: outer onion peels of brown Spanish onions.
Natural red: peels of red onions, red cabbage, red wine
Bright red/pink: beetroot pieces
Yellow: carrots, turmeric spice
Green: parsley, spinach

In case we need the eggs to have more than a solid color I found that wrapping small leaves or early spring flowers tightly around the eggs using nylons before cooking them in the dye gives very beautiful results:

enter image description here

The pretty pictures and handy list of veggie dyes gets you an up-vote. — KalleMP, Apr 09 '15 at 22:55
You can boil the eggs in black tea to give them a brown color. — Ejaz, Apr 29 '15 at 20:19

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 05 '15 at 00:27

In my family, we never used artificial colored dyes.

Instead, we took the leftover onion peels in the pantry, wrapped them around the eggs and boiled them.

The downside of this is you do need to plan in advance a little as you need to have raw eggs and you end up coloring them while you hard boil them. If the eggs are cooked, you really can't do this unless you want to cook the eggs again. You also have to have a sufficient quantity of onion peels laying around.

The basic steps are:

Wet everything down
Wrap the egg in the onion peel.
Secure it with a rubber band
Hard boil the egg.

Depending how you wrap them, you'll end up with a very nice marbled look that varies in color depending on what kind of onions you use. We typically have yellow onions, so I know the will give you a red-brown color. I have never tried it with any other color of onion, so I can't speak for the coloring with them and if it would be any different.

How to dye eggs without food dye?

2 Answers2