Soucolor vs Prismacolor Premier, is the nine dollar colored pencil set actually worth it

Thirteen cents a pencil against a dollar and four cents: that is the whole argument, and for most of the drawing done on a kitchen table on a Tuesday night, the thirteen-cent pencil is the correct purchase. The Soucolor 72-count set, listed at $9.63 on Amazon in September 2026 with more than 24,800 ratings behind it, has taken the top of Amazon's colored pencil bestseller ranking from Prismacolor Premier, and the reason is not a mystery. It is a wax-based soft-core pencil that lays down colour and blends, sold at a price where breakage is an annoyance rather than a loss.

What the extra money buys is not vibrancy and not blending. It is information about whether the drawing will still be the same colour in five years. Prismacolor publishes ASTM D6901 lightfastness categories for its 150-colour line; Soucolor publishes nothing, and neither does Castle Art Supplies. For a coloring book, a sketchbook page, or the first two years of learning how layering works, that gap is worth nothing at all. For anything that goes behind glass on a sunlit wall, it is the only thing on this page that matters.

The Coloring Butterfly review is one of the few written assessments of the line, and it is not a dismissal: soft wax core, smooth application, good layering, responsive to both light and heavy pressure, rich colour variety. The barrel is 7.4 mm cedar around a 3.1 mm core, the set is made in China, and the pencils are marked as best for student and hobbyist use.

The complaints are the ones a thirteen-cent pencil earns. Leads break and splinter during sharpening. The colour names printed on the barrels disappear after the first sharpening, which in a 72-colour set is a real inconvenience. The soft core loses its point quickly, so fine detail is a fight, and wax dust and bloom show up under heavy layering. There is no open stock: when the mid-tone green runs out, the remedy is another whole set, which at $9.63 is a strange kind of consolation.

No brand-published lightfastness rating exists, and Soucolor was not among the 50-plus brands in the independent sunlight testing. Nobody has published a figure for how fast these fade. This is the set for coloring books, for practice swatches, for teaching a hand what six layers feel like before spending real money on the same lesson.

The Premier line is the cheapest thing in the United States that calls itself professional grade, and reviewers treat it that way. The core is 3.8 mm, wax-based, carrying a higher pigment load than most competitors, which is why the laydown is creamy and the blending is the benchmark everything else gets measured against. Sarah Renae Clark's comparison of Prismacolor alternatives prices the line at $0.65 to $1.25 a pencil and calls out excellent blending and strong layering capacity in the same breath as the flaw: "they also break very easily."

Breakage is the recurring theme. Parka Blogs catalogues warped wood casings, off-centre cores and cracking during sharpening following the move of production to Mexico, and quotes the professional colored pencil artist Lisa Clough saying that fighting with her pencils was a large part of why she stopped working in the medium. Electric sharpeners cause markedly less damage than handheld ones. Wax bloom limits how many layers will sit cleanly on top of each other.

Against that, Prismacolor is the only set here that tells a buyer which colours will hold. Its published chart claims over half the 150-colour line falls into ASTM Category I or II, and independent sunlight testing put 7 of 12 tested colours at a pass with about 27% average fade, close enough to the manufacturer's own claim to take the chart seriously. The 24-count tin at $24.99 is the recommended starting point for new buyers, and at $1.04 per pencil it is the set to buy for someone who wants a soft artist-grade core and intends to frame something.

Castle Art sits in the middle by price and, unusually, by evidence. The 72-piece display tin was listed at $39.99, reduced from $44.99, on the company's own site, which works out to $0.56 a pencil. Reviewers price the Premium line at $0.45 to $0.60 per pencil. The pencils are wax-based with basswood barrels and a 3.8 mm core, and The Art Gear Guide layered them to six layers with no core shattering during sharpening, which is precisely the failure mode Prismacolor buyers complain about. Best Colored Pencils scored the 72-count set 4 out of 5 and called the pricing a fantastic asking price, while flagging that yellows and oranges need several passes to reach full opacity and that the barrel colours do not reliably match what comes off the tip.

On fade resistance the company is candid. Its FAQ states that in the absence of a universally recognised system for lightfast testing it runs a range of in-house tests, and concedes that pinks, yellows and light blues are more liable to fade, recommending heavier layering and burnishing for those colours and keeping finished work out of direct sun. No ASTM category appears anywhere on the site. Independent testing found the Premium line passing 7 of 11 colours, slightly better than Prismacolor's rate, while the Gold line passed 0 of 10 and the Pasteltint line 0 of 4.

This is the set for the heavy-handed colourist who sharpens constantly and has lost patience with snapping cores, and who wants 72 colours without paying Prismacolor's per-unit price.

Three things separate these sets, and pigment quality is the least measurable of them.

The first is disclosure. ASTM D6901 was published in 2003 and is entirely voluntary; it rates colours on a five-category scale, and only Categories I and II may claim compliance. Prismacolor tests and publishes. Soucolor and Castle Art do not. That is a difference in what a buyer knows, not automatically a difference in what fades, and it is worth being precise about which one is being paid for.

The second is breakage, where the price ordering inverts. The most expensive pencil here is the one reviewers describe as breaking very easily, with warped casings and off-centre cores; the mid-priced one survived sharpening tests without shattering. Anyone who presses hard is buying a worse experience by spending more.

The third is the per-pencil arithmetic, which is brutal. Prismacolor's 24-count tin costs two and a half times what the 72-colour Soucolor set costs and delivers a third of the colours. The jump from $9.63 to $24.99 is not a jump in blending quality of any comparable size.

The strongest objection to buying the cheap set runs through Castle Art. Its Premium line passed 7 of 11 colours in independent sunlight exposure, marginally better than Prismacolor's 7 of 12, without publishing a single ASTM category. If an untested brand can match a tested one, the published chart looks like paperwork rather than pigment, and the cheap sets deserve the benefit of the doubt.

It does not hold, and Castle Art's own results are why. The same test put the brand's Gold line at 0 of 10 and its Pasteltint line at 0 of 4. Untested lines are not uniformly bad; they are unpredictable, and unpredictable is the property that makes a drawing a gamble. Prismacolor's chart does not make every Premier colour permanent, since roughly half the range is not rated lightfast and warm reds and magentas are the first to go. It does let a buyer choose a palette that will survive. No amount of good luck in a sunlight test substitutes for that, and nobody has published a sunlight test of Soucolor at all.

The Colored Pencil Society of America encourages artists to press manufacturers for ratings; Parka Blogs suggests a cheaper route, which is to make swatches and leave them in a window for months. Two hours on a Saturday produces both a blending exercise and the only lightfastness data anyone will ever have for a Soucolor pencil.

Buy the Soucolor 72 at $9.63. For coloring books, sketchbook pages, practice swatches and the whole first stretch of learning how layering and pressure behave, nothing in the published record justifies spending four to eight times more per pencil, and 72 colours at thirteen cents each removes the anxiety that makes hobbyists hoard their good pencils and never use them.

Buy the Prismacolor Premier 24-count tin at $24.99 when a piece is going to be framed and hung. It is the only set here that says which of its colours will survive, and an electric sharpener is close to mandatory with it.

Buy the Castle Art Supplies 72-piece set at $39.99 for one specific reason: a heavy hand that keeps snapping Prismacolor cores. It survives sharpening, layers to six, and costs $0.56 a pencil, but its lightfastness is a private matter between the company and its in-house tests.

The useful consequence of all this is that the thirteen-cent set and the dollar set are not competitors. One is for making things, and the other is for keeping them.