H&X Finding the Lost Girl Colored Pencils Review: A Collector's Curiosity with One Big Catch

Introduction

Some colored pencil sets earn their place in a collection simply because they are hard to find. The H&X “Finding the Lost Girl” set is exactly that kind of pencil. Made by H&X, a large Chinese art supply company, this 72-pencil set is genuinely difficult to track down, with stock appearing and disappearing across online marketplaces. That scarcity alone makes it interesting, but the real question is whether the pencils themselves are worth the hunt.

The short version: the cores are highly saturated, well pigmented, and a pleasure to layer and blend. The frustrating part is that the cores broke constantly during extended use. This review walks through both sides so you can decide whether this obscure set deserves a spot in your drawer.

Who This Product Is For

This is, first and foremost, a collector’s set. It sits in the same category as other hard-to-find pencil lines that enthusiasts hunt down for the joy of owning something unusual. If you enjoy cataloging obscure sets, comparing them against mainstream brands, and swatching for the sake of swatching, this set has real appeal.

If you are a working artist who needs dependable pencils for deadlines and commissioned work, the core breakage issue described below is something to weigh carefully before committing.

What’s Inside the Tin

The set arrives as 72 pencils in a two-layer tin. The top layer runs through yellows, skin tones, reds, purples, and blues; the bottom layer covers greens, a solid range of earth tones such as yellow ochres and burnt umbers, and a run of grays, finishing with two blacks. Interestingly, there is a single metallic silver pencil tucked in, which feels like a random inclusion where a metallic gold or a more useful color could have gone instead.

One quirk worth knowing: there are two versions of this set on the market, differing only in the artwork printed on the tin. To the best of available research, the pencil colors inside both versions are the same.

Core Specifications and Build

These are substantial pencils. The core measures 4.3 mm, noticeably chunkier than the roughly 3.8 mm average of many sets, and the barrel is 7.8 mm, close in feel to thick-barreled drawing pencils. The entire barrel is lacquered the same color as the core, capped with a simple decorative gold ring near the end.

Barrel printing is minimal: the phrase “Draw your inspiration,” the H&X mark, and some Chinese text. There are no pencil numbers, no pigment names, and no lightfast ratings anywhere on the barrel.

Color Selection and Swatching

The palette is a decent, fairly typical spread for a 72 set. Yellows and skin tones lead off, followed by oranges, vermillions, and pinks (the pinks are a bit thin), then strong reds, lavenders, and purples. Some purples and lavenders are quite close to each other, which feels like a missed opportunity for a more distinct color. Blues include some lovely aqua tones and a couple of deep dark blues, while the greens are a genuine highlight: plentiful, varied, and distinct from one another. Earth tones are solid, and the grays split into light and dark cool and warm variants before the two closing blacks.

Layering tests on Strathmore 300 series Bristol vellum showed nicely saturated, well-pigmented color. Holding the pencil at the very end of the barrel for five barely-touching light layers produced a clear, smooth transition between layers, with a rich heavy application on top. Blending tests also performed well: yellow over blue produced a clean green, red and yellow gave a vivid orange, and the red-and-blue purple, often the hardest third color to achieve, came out convincingly.

Things to Consider Before Buying

Here is the catch, and it is a significant one. During a piece that took around nine and a half hours of drawing time over six or seven days, the cores broke constantly. This was not a sharpener problem: the issue persisted across a hand-crank sharpener and a bullet-type sharpener, even with fresh blades. Cores would drop out mid-stroke under medium pressure, and laying down color sometimes meant working so gently that the core shifted inside the barrel.

The genuinely strange part is that the pencils sharpen beautifully. Poor-quality casing wood usually snags and snaps soft cores during sharpening, and that simply was not happening here. That points toward either rough transit handling or a broader quality control issue with the cores themselves. With no wider sample of owner feedback available, there is no definitive answer on whether this was a one-off shipment problem or a set-wide issue.

There is also the labeling problem. With no numbers or pigment names on the barrels, once a pencil leaves its slot in the tin and is not returned to exactly the same spot, matching it back to your swatch chart becomes a tedious guessing game. Many buyers end up applying their own numbered stickers, which works but adds unwanted effort.

How They Perform on Black Paper

An opacity test with heavy applications on black paper showed a mixed profile. The blue and the white came out satisfyingly opaque, while the green, red, and yellow were more translucent, letting the black show through. That is not a judgment of quality, merely an indication of how each color covers; every set mixes opaque and translucent pencils. The white in particular looks like a capable contender for artists who rely on a strong opaque white.

Buying Advice

If you see this set available and you are a collector, it is a beautiful and unusual tin to chase, and the core performance, when it behaves, is genuinely excellent: richly saturated, wonderful to layer on both Bristol vellum and Bristol smooth, and blending well throughout. Be prepared, though, for the possibility of fragile cores and the inconvenience of unlabeled barrels.

If dependability matters more to you than rarity, weigh the breakage risk seriously before buying. If you do pick up a set and experience the same issues, sharing that experience helps the wider community figure out whether this is an isolated problem or a pattern.

Conclusion

The H&X Finding the Lost Girl set is a tale of two extremes. On one side: gorgeous saturation, beautiful layering and blending, thick generous cores, and clean sharpening from quality casing wood. On the other: relentless core breakage during extended use and zero barrel labeling. For collectors of obscure colored pencils, it remains a set worth having catalogued and, if you can find it in stock, worth owning. For artists who need trouble-free daily tools, proceed with eyes open.