Why our eggs come in so many colors

Open a carton from our flock and the first thing people ask is whether the eggs are dyed. They're not. Every color in the basket is made by the hen herself — and each shade tells you a little about the bird that laid it.

Every egg starts out white

An eggshell is mostly calcium carbonate, and on its own that's white. Color is added in the shell gland, where an egg spends most of the roughly 25 hours it takes a hen to form it. Which pigment gets laid down — and when — depends on the breed.

Blue goes all the way through

Our Lavender Ameraucanas lay soft blue eggs. The blue comes from biliverdin, a pigment related to bile, and in blue-egg breeds it's deposited while the shell itself is being built. That means the color runs through the whole shell: crack one open and the inside is blue too.

Chocolate is painted on at the end

Brown is a different pigment — protoporphyrin — and it's applied late, mostly as a coating near the end of shell formation. Black Copper Marans lay some of the darkest eggs of any breed, and on the deepest chocolate eggs much of that color sits in the outermost layer. Crack one and you'll find a lighter interior.

That late coating is also why a Marans hen's eggs can lighten as she lays through a long season, then deepen again after a rest.

Green and olive are both at once

Put a brown coating over a blue shell and you get green. That's the idea behind the Olive Egger — a cross between a blue-egg breed and a dark-brown-egg breed — which is why no two Olive Egger hens lay quite the same shade. Some run sage, some run deep olive.

Our Silverudd hens, a Swedish breed, lay mossy green eggs, often with fine speckles.

Where speckles come from

Speckles are small concentrations of pigment. They tend to appear when an egg rotates or pauses as the color is going on, and some hens are simply more prone to them than others. We think they're one of the best parts of a mixed basket.

Does shell color change what's inside?

No. Shell color comes from pigment, not nutrition. What's inside an egg is shaped by the hen's diet, her health and the egg's freshness — which is why our attention goes to organic, non-GMO feed, daily time on pasture, and careful handling.

Build a basket that looks like ours

If you're hatching for color, pair breeds deliberately: a blue layer, a dark-brown layer and a green layer will give you a basket with real range for years. And if you just want to see the spread for yourself, you can build a custom dozen one shell color at a time.