Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To address various things I see coming up in other reviews: I ordered these and just got them. NO DUPLICATE COLORS in my box (not even black or white; I did receive metallic gold and metallic silver), no visibly broken pencils, no damaged pencils (well, okay, *one* had some dents on one part, but no big deal). NO EXTRAS like color blending sticks (nor did the product description promise any, at least not at the time I made my purchase). Package had adequate protection/padding (lots of those bubble-wrap blobs), and they came in just six days. As for the quality of the product, overall... I know from prior experience that PrismaColor Premier pencils are great. They blend well and look beautiful. Unfortunately, they do have the problem of the core breaking too much, which is frustrating. I'm not sure it can be avoided, though, since they are soft core pencils, after all. To me what's worse is when one of the cores is off center, and it's just a disaster trying to sharpen it, as the lead keeps breaking AND big chunks of the wood keep splitting off. These look alright in that respect but of course I can't be sure yet. And that's rare, anyway (maybe 1 in 30 pencils is like that). If you want something harder, try the Verithin. I don't think the occasional broken core means the pencils are a bad product, and especially not when they're been shipped.