Best Pigments and Colorants for Resin
There's a version of this hobby where you own four colorants and make beautiful things, and a version where you own forty and most of them sit in a drawer going hard. I've lived both. This is the list I'd hand myself three years ago — what's worth buying, in what order, and the stuff I'd skip.
Everything here is available in the US and Canada — Amazon, Michaels, or direct from the brand.
First purchase: a mica sampler set
Not one jar. A set. Color mixing in resin is harder than it sounds, and having 24 pre-made colors beats trying to mix teal from blue and yellow mica (it comes out muddy — ask me how I know).
Jacquard Pearl Ex is the premium option, and the pigment quality shows in fine jewelry work. Rolio and Let's Resin samplers are cheaper and honestly close in quality for most projects — 24 to 50 little jars, usually under $30 CAD.
One warning from my own shelf: I once grabbed no-name mica jars from Dollarama to save a few dollars. The color payoff was weak, and the grind was coarse enough that pendants came out faintly gritty on the back. Some cheap micas are great. That one wasn't, and at those prices you can't tell until you've poured. Stick to brands with reviews you can read.
Second: white and black opaque pigment
Boring. Essential. White turns any color pastel and opaque, black gives you depth and contrast, and between them they multiply your whole mica collection. A drop of white behind a translucent color layer is the difference between "craft project" and "product."
Castin' Craft opaque pigments are the classic — Michaels carries them, so does Amazon. Buy the bigger bottles; you'll use white faster than any other color you own. I go through roughly three whites for every one of anything else.
Third: a small liquid pigment kit
For solid, repeatable colors — the kind you need when someone orders three matching pairs of earrings — liquid pigment beats mica. It mixes in evenly with no streaks and no settling, so batch two looks like batch one.
Let's Resin and Limino both sell 15–20 bottle kits. They're concentrated: 2–3 drops per 1 oz (30 ml) does it, and going far past that risks a soft cure (how much is too much).
Fourth, maybe: alcohol inks
Beautiful, but specialized. If you're not doing petri art, dyed "agate" slices, or flowing abstract pieces, you may not need them at all.
If you are: Piñata inks are the resin-world standard, Ranger (Tim Holtz) inks are everywhere in craft stores. Start with three colors plus Piñata Blanco — the white is what makes petri effects sink and lace. Skip the 50-bottle ink sets; I bought one early on and used maybe six colors before the rest dried out in their bottles. That's real money evaporating in a drawer.
Worth a jar: glow powder
Glow-in-the-dark powder is a genuine crowd-pleaser at markets — kids gravitate to the glow pieces like moths. Buy strontium aluminate powder specifically, not zinc sulfide. Zinc glows for a few minutes; strontium glows all night. Full glow guide here.
What I'd skip entirely
Giant glitter tubs (you'll use a pinch a year), craft-store dye kits that don't say resin-compatible anywhere on the label, and anything water-based. Food coloring and watercolor inks will stop your resin curing — that's not a style choice, it's chemistry (what happens when resin doesn't cure).
And eyeshadow — fine as a fun experiment, not as a plan. Crushed shadow is mica plus binders and oils, and the binders sometimes leave a faint haze.
The whole starter list, priced out
A mica sampler (~$25), white and black opaques (~$20), and a small liquid kit (~$25) — that's about $70 CAD and it covers pearly, pastel, solid, and dark looks across basically every project type. Add inks and glow powder when a specific project demands them, not before.
Pair the pigments with a couple of well-made molds and you're set for months of pouring. The colorant matters, but the mold surface is what makes the color shine — literally. A glossy mold does half your finishing work for you.
What's in your pigment drawer that you actually reach for every week? I'm always curious whether other makers converge on the same four or five workhorses I did.
— Nikolai