Dying Eggs - Yellow/Yellow Orange

I wanted to figure out how to dye Easter eggs using natural dyes. My first attempt this year was somewhat mixed so I wanted to do proper experiments to figure out the best formulas, or at least, formulas that work.

Here are the results of my experiment to dye hard-boiled eggs with yellow/yellow-orange dye from yellow onion skins.

1. Pour three cups of water into a small stainless steel pot and add a large handful of yellow onion skins.


2. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Strain out the onion skins. The resulting liquid was dark orange.


3. I divided the dye into three cups. The first one was the plain dye, the second one had 1/8 cup white vinegar added, the third one had 1/4 cup of white vinegar. To each cup I added one already hard-boiled egg.

4. After five minutes in the dye, this is what the eggs looked like. The left most one is the plain dye. It was a very light yellow. The eggs in the vinegar solution were light orangy.


5. Here they are after another five minutes.


6. After a total of 15 minutes here are the eggs.
Just the onion dye:


With 1/8 cup vinegar:


With 1/4 cup vinegar:



As you can see the eggs with the vinegar solution turned a darker orangey color, but the vinegar also started to dissolve the eggshell. It was easy to rub the color (and part of the eggshell) off the shell.

7. Final result after 20 minutes in the dyes:
So, the vinegar free solution was the winner.