Adult Coloring Has Gone Mainstream

(Photo: Crayola)

Adult coloring books — once impossible to find and now totally trendy — have officially gone mainstream. Arts & crafts brand Crayola has thrown its hat into the ring, debuting four Color Escapes Adult Coloring Kits earlier today.

Each kit comes with 12 intricately-designed “premium coloring pages,” plus colored pencils and markers designed to help you stay inside the (tiny, myriad) lines. They’re beautiful, and a little more sophisticated than the My Little Pony books that line the shelves at Toys ‘R’ Us, but is there any value to trying one out for yourself?

Like Crayola’s version’s name implies, adult coloring books can be an “escape” — a way to tune out, similar to meditation or going for a run. As Guy Winch, PhD, Yahoo Health advisory board member and author explained, adult coloring books are “essentially a form of occupational therapy — using arts and crafts to bind anxiety, calm the mind, and zone out from the stresses of life.”

You could just use books meant for children, Winch points out, but drawing in an adult book may be easier to stomach. “Psychologically speaking, people would get roughly the same ‘therapeutic effect’ from coloring books their older kids might use but of course, most adults would feel awkward laboring over an image of a princess riding a horse on the beach, regardless of how complex the pattern of wave coloring is,” Winch told Yahoo Health.

Bright new invention or clever marketing? That’s up to you to decide.

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