Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My five year old daughter received this kit as a gift from her grandmother because, and I quote, "she likes bling". The picture of the front is dazzling, a heaping pile of golden eggs, glittering in the sun, not unlike the pile of fool's gold Laura and Jonah found on Little House on The Prairie. I was ready to boil up an extra dozen eggs just to decorate the house with these gems. And then I saw the words "2 paintbrushes included". Wait, what? For the uninitiated, dying eggs is an exercise in frustration even with the old school PAAS kits that stunk up the house with vinegar and gave you a fake crayon to doodle on the eggs with. Why? Because it's a ROUND object with NO stable surface and it ALL must be dyed. So even after dunking with the little brass opera glasses thing, you have to sort of hold it in mid air for a while because if you put it in the li'l egg drying tray right away, you'll drip all over, it'll bump into other eggs inevitably (especially when toddlers and anxiety patients are around) and the once nice, smooth, pink egg will have some big blue smear mark on it or whatever. GOOD GOD I DIGRESS. So the golden egg kit contains two little ketchup packet sized thingees of golden glaze and three glaze tints (red,blue, yellow). It also comes with a nice plastic palette to mix the glazes in. There's really only enough glaze for about five eggs, but maybe if you find a way to keep 20% of it off the palette, your fingers, the kitchen counter or the drying tray you could get more out of it. As soon as the dye glaze touches the egg it stains it, so every brush stroke with these eeeensy brushes shows on the finished product, particularly if the tints are involved. So imagine a five year old with little hands and not the smoothest stroke, trying to make a beautiful egg that ends up looking like a pickled egg that fell in a rain puddle and got peed on by a dog. The glaze is extremely loose and drippy, doesn't cling to the egg very well and takes, at minimum 20 minutes to dry, so when you turn the egg to paint the underside, tragedy is imminent: finger smears, streaks, drips, and blotches. On a little more positive note, the streaks and blotchiness smooths out a BIT while they dry, and the two eggs that I did with a 1" wide acrylic paint brush came out OK, but certainly not at all the shimmery metallic treasure pictured on the box. I'm of course more disappointed for my own inner Martha Stewart...my kid just wants to know when the candy gets here.