How to make Organic Holi colors from Flowers | Holi Experiment by our Founder
One of the big items on my agenda for the coming few months is how we can create a circular economy for our flowers — although reducing wastage has been an obsession for a long time, now I want to figure out how we can turn used flowers into something valuable.
With Holi just around the corner, I thought I’d start with Holi colors. I recorded the journey on my Instagram and found to my surprise that so many people cared + participated + had helpful tips and were excited to see more!
Since I approached this purely as an experiment, I also had a ton of fun doing it. I started out thinking that I needed to make liquid pigment and then turn that into powder. Instead I ended up with dough and slime (a truly unexpected turn) on day two.
I then went down a few more paths trying to figure out the best way and 9 days later finally got some colors I was proud of. The end result was so simple — just drying petals and grinding them — but the journey involved learning which flowers worked, which didn’t, how much drying time they need, which ones smell good, which ones look grey — so on and so forth.
To cap off my experiments, I sent out small samples of the colors to the people who signed up on my Instagram story, thinking this would be a good way to end the journey.
To my surprise, many of them came back with ideas I hadn’t yet thought of. Can we paint with these pigments? Can we dye cloth with it? Does it actually work as a flower scrub (an idea inspired by my mother when we were doing skin tests)? Why do they smell like sugarcane to some and different flowers to others? The same wonder, joy and curiosity that I felt in playing with these colors came back to me through our community, this time multifold!
I feel like the best part of this entire journey was feeling like a kid again — with my pots and pans brewing and messing around to discover things I didn’t know before. I used my family kitchen to try all these different things and everyone from my grandmother to my little sister got involved in the process. It made me think of the old joke — that maybe the real victory was the fun we had along the way?
So I made a mini ‘DIY Holi Colors’ guide for kids — so that even though we can’t go out and celebrate holi in crazy crowds, maybe kids can do something fun (and educational!) at home with their family.
I love experiments and have spoken about how we constantly run experiments in house for everything from marketing to product to flower science — and I thought I could share some of that ethos here!
I’ve attached the cards below if you’d like to download them and try it out at home. You can also drop me a message here or at rhea@rosebazaar.in to get a copy!
If you do try this at home, please send me pictures/videos/your thoughts — I’d love to know what you learnt!