Phoenix Color 100 Colored Pencils Review: Genuinely Beautiful, Genuinely Good

Introduction

Some art supplies earn a reputation purely on performance. Others win you over on looks. The Phoenix Color 100 set manages both, which is why it deserves more attention than its obscurity suggests.

This is a Chinese set of 100 colored pencils, and it is fair to say the presentation is the first thing you notice. The packaging and barrel design make a genuine case for calling these among the most beautiful colored pencils currently available, but the more important question for any artist is simpler: do they actually work? In testing across layering, blending, and solvent use, they held up far better than the pretty packaging might suggest.

First Impressions and Packaging

The 100 pencils arrive in five individual boxes, each holding 20 pencils and each color coded: red, yellow, blue, green, and black. All five boxes sit inside a larger outer box so the whole set can sit neatly on a desk without the smaller boxes sliding around.

The box fronts feature layered, die-cut style Chinese artwork rather than flat printed imagery, giving them a real sense of depth and craft. Inside, the boxes close magnetically with a recessed inlay holding each pencil. Everything inside is written in Chinese, with no English text anywhere in the set.

The red box covers reds, pinks, vermilions, and a couple of useful flesh tones. The yellow box holds warm browns, lemon tones, and ochres. The blue box carries blues and purples, including a lovely dark indigo. The green box is a highlight, with a selection of greens that work beautifully for botanical subjects, including a standout jade green. The black box is the weakest assortment: it mixes in peaches, flesh tones, and pale pinks alongside cool and warm grays, so it is less of a pure neutral set than the label implies.

The Pencils Themselves

Each pencil has a 3.6mm core in a 7.8mm barrel, which is an average size for colored pencils. The barrel color matches the core color throughout, which makes picking the right pencil quicker at a glance.

On one side of the barrel you get the Phoenix Color name, and on the opposite side Chinese text. The end of every barrel carries a unique gold-leaf style design, so no two pencils share the same ornamentation. The metallic finish can make the designs hard to see in certain lighting, and with no pigment names or numbers printed anywhere, you will need to build your own tracking system to keep tabs on specific colors.

Performance: Layering, Blending and Solvent

The core sits at a medium softness, neither very soft nor very hard. Points hold reasonably well under light layers, though they round off faster under pressure. Across a full swatch of all 100 pencils, not a single core shattered while sharpening or during use, which is genuinely impressive at this softness level. There is a little crumbling under pressure, which is expected for a medium-soft core.

The layer test of five light applications shows strong pigment strength even in the early layers, with enough pigment laid down by five layers to work with odorless mineral spirits. Blending tests produced clean third colors: red and yellow gave a convincing orange, blue and yellow a solid green, and red and blue produced a nicely saturated purple, which is often the hardest blend to land.

For artists who use odorless mineral spirits, the pigment breaks down well, filling the tooth of the paper and reinvigorating the surface for further layers and richer depth. The white pencil, though, is relatively translucent on dark paper rather than thick and opaque, so it is not the set to buy if an opaque white is your priority.

The swatched palette overall is comprehensive and well balanced, with a good spread of light and dark values rather than the lopsided selections some sets suffer from. Swatching was done on Bristol vellum, and a grape study on textured lightfast paper accepted plenty of layers and produced a pleasing result.

Buying Advice and Availability

There is no lightfastness information provided with the set. If any testing exists, it is likely in-house only, so treat these as a set for sketchbook work, personal pieces, and practice rather than for commissions, competitions, or gallery work where fading matters.

These pencils are not super expensive, but they are not cheap either, so the purchase depends on your budget and how much value you place on owning a beautifully presented set. Sourcing has been through AliExpress, and how long the set stays available is uncertain, so if it is a collection piece you want, sooner is probably better than later.

One honest warning: the set is so well packaged and the pencils so attractive that some owners will struggle to bring themselves to sharpen them. That would be a shame, because underneath the beauty is a genuinely pleasant pencil to draw with.

Conclusion

The Phoenix Color 100 set looked, on the surface, like it might be all packaging and no substance. It is not. The cores layer well, blend into clean third colors, dissolve nicely with solvent, and survived sharpening without a single break. The black box is the one real misstep, and the lack of lightfast data limits its use for archival work. For artists who love colored pencils, appreciate beautiful objects, and want a set that is a joy to open as well as to use, this is an easy recommendation.