Homemade Holi Colours

Today is the festival of colors, Holi. We made our own Holi colours at home this year and they turned out lovely so we thought of sharing the recipe with you all.

These colors are super simple to make with a few ingredients available at home. In fact, kids can make them on their own with very little help from you.

Holi marks the beginning of spring after a long winter and also symbolizes the triumph of good over evil.

It's a two day festival - first day is called Chhoti Holi, which starts with Holika Dahan (bonfire) in the evening where people gather and perform religious rituals. Next morning is Holi when people meet friends/family and smear each other with colors.

My daughter is super excited to play Holi this year. I have always been paranoid about the chemicals in many of the Holi colors sold. Since my daughter was born, we never bought colors from outside. We used fruit/vegetable colors, turmeric, kumkum powder (red roli), and last year we ended up using flour :).

In this post, we share our recipe to make Holi colors at home. This is a fun way to engage kids in festive activities and in the process teach them the importance of the festival and story of Holi.

This post contains affiliate links to the products mentioned. Read our disclosure policy for more information.

How to make Holi color at home?

Supplies:
Cornstarch Powder
Food Colors
Water
Bowl
Folk
Mixing Spoon

Instructions to make Holi gulal at home:

1. Take 1/2 cup of water in a bowl and add 6-8 drops of food color. My daughter loves pastel colors so we kept our gulal colors light but you can increase the color drops to make your holi colors bright.

2. Mix 1 cup of cornstarch to the colored water. Mix the cornstarch and water until it becomes thick. This mixture will be very similar to a popular kids science experiment called Oobleck (non-Newtonian fluid).

This mixture might require some fine tuning so keep additional cornstarch on hand if you need to thicken the mixture.

3. Let the mixture dry. We left it over night but it might take just a few hours.

4. Once the mixture is completely dry, start poking it with a fork and it will break into powder. If needed, you can use your hands to make fine powder.

And you are done, you now have dry Holi color ready to play with! You can also store it in a ziplock plastic bag to use later.