Like a lot of us, I have gotten in the habit of spending a lot of time scrolling social media—and it’s starting to affect me. It feels demanding, overwhelming and draining, all at once. I feel like I have a shortened attention span and need more instant gratification online than I would like to admit. So, I decided to do something about it and started looking for something that would help me shut off my brain for a little while in a healthier way. 

This led me to stumble across a study that talked about the benefits coloring can have on helping you sleep because it can reduce body aches, slow heart rate and breathing, and reduce feelings of depression and anxiety.1 All of this sounded great to me, so, I decided to try Colorfy, an app that is essentially a coloring book game app where you can color in mandalas, famous paintings, geometric patterns, florals, scenic visuals, animals, or even your own uploaded images whenever and wherever you want. 

 I tested out the app for over a month and I am very pleased to find that it served its role of helping me calm my mind. Instead of feeling like I am just distracting myself from my life, I feel like I am proactively occupying my mind with a calming repetitive task that helps to stabilize my thoughts.

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Coloring Books for Stress Relief

Using the Colorfy App

I have to admit that when I read the description on the app before downloading it, all I saw was numbers: 25 million users, 300,000 reviews. While all this is impressive to see, it told me very little about the company that made the app and how it began. Sure, there’s a fluffy little paragraph about mental wellness, but it felt like it found five buzzwords the marketing team told the app developer they had to use and they ran with them.

Colorfy is essentially just an immense gallery from which you can select images based on personal preference, filling them in with color to your liking. On my home screen “library,” as the app calls it, I could choose from Trending, Basic, Florals, Animals, Famous, Messages, Cats, Lifestyle, Gardens, Patterns, Food, etc. Unfortunately, there is no search button if you want to find a specific image, just these sections to search through manually. 

From there it’s a straightforward concept that’s easy to grasp, picking your colors and shades as you go and filling in small sections of the whole picture until it’s completed. I had the ability to scrap or pause and come back to the drawing at any time. And Colorfy can be used offline as well, so I can play without being tempted to quickly go check my social media or be distracted by phone notifications.

I found it helpful to go back and forth between intricate, detailed portraits and silly cartoonesque pandas as palate cleansers. Sometimes I would pick an easy image and be finished in 10 minutes. On other occasions I would spend hours filling in wonderfully detailed, complex patterns.

However, I did not get warm, personable, or relaxing vibes when I first downloaded the free version of the app.

Instead, a timer countdown told me how many minutes I had left before I could unlock a new free image. A pop-up wanted me to upgrade to Colorfy Premium to avoid ads and get new pictures every day. Another banner up top was telling me to “subscribe now.” This overwhelmed me right off the bat.

My feelings didn’t get better as I realized that unlocked picture options are definitely limited if you stick to the free version. I could only access what felt like about 25% of the images shown—and most of the images I actually wanted to color in were behind a paywall.

True, I could unlock the “new image of the day” that the app offered each day—you don’t have to actually color it in right away, you can just save it for later and start a collection—and you don’t have to watch one of its many ads to do this.

Still, I was frustrated by the paywall, so after a couple weeks of growing more and more annoyed that I couldn’t color what I wanted, I bit the bullet and signed up for the premium version. 

The Premium Version

Colorfy Premium costs $9.99 per week (after a one week trial), which, to be honest, is pretty high. For instance, Happy Color, another coloring app, is free to use (but also interrupts your coloring with a distracting amount of ads), and Chroma only costs 59 cents a week. Other wellness apps, such as Calm, which offers meditation and sleep exercises, come with much more content and even lower prices (Calm costs $14.99 a month).

So, after just one week, I canceled the premium subscription.

As nice as it was to have access to extra color palettes, such as “Shades of Dark,” “Vivid,” or “Autumn” or have access to more images to color, it was not worth $9.99 a week. After all, I wasn’t here to make a grand masterpiece to print and hang on my wall, I just needed any image to color in and occupy my mind—and I could do that with the free offerings.

I did run into some screen freezes and annoyances around the touch screen. Many images have very tiny spaces to fill in, and if you click them slightly wrong with your finger you’ll accidentally repaint the whole sky, for example, derailing you and forcing you to backtrack. I would suggest working on a larger tablet to avoid this problem.

On a positive note, I did not need to be a tech wizard to figure out how to maneuver through the app. If I handed it to a 4-year-old child, they could manage to find a picture and start coloring, and if I showed it to my 80-year-old grandma who knows nothing about technology, she too could figure it out. 

Uploading My Own Images

In both the free and premium versions of Colorfy, if I had something I was envisioning that I found the app didn’t have, I had options. Under the “Create” tab, I could choose to draw mandalas, then color them; import my own drawings or photos (there are then grayscale filters to work with to make them suitable for coloring); or compose my own messages that I could then color. If I was incredibly proud of my creation or feeling generous, I could enable other users to paint my uploads as well. I was honestly lazy and found it sufficient to use the images made available in the app gallery. 

Other Features

Coloring is often an activity well-suited for introverts, but with Colorfy I could also tap into an active online community by browsing completed drawings others have shared, follow their profile (almost like on Instagram), and see their gallery of work.

If I wanted, I could upload my growing collection to my profile for others to see and get inspired by. For an activity that’s so often enjoyed in solitude, it’s a nice and easy way to form a mini-connection with like-minded humans.

Pros and Cons

How I felt about Colorfy varied throughout my experience. I was hopeful about the possibilities of a better screen time experience than social media, then frustrated by the paywalls and ads. I became excited to have unlocked a world of new colors and images when I upgraded to Premium, only to realize that, for me, it did not hold the value that I thought it would. Here are my Colorfy pros and cons.

Pros

• Free version is extensive
• Easy to figure out
• A quick destresser
• Caters to many ages
• Can feel more fulfilling and healthier than other social media app alternatives
• Can upload your own drawings or messages to color
• Can connect with other user profiles to get inspiration from their gallery of finished works

Cons

• Marketing approach feels cold
• Most of the images are behind a paywall
• Too heavy on the ads
• Many unsatisfied customer reviews referring to technical glitches in the app

Final Thoughts

Mental health or wellness apps, like Colorfy, are obviously never going to replace other forms of mental health treatments, like talking to a therapist—and in the long run, if I had more severe anxiety or insomnia, I doubt that coloring in mandalas on an app would help me as much as that initial study suggested it might.1  But if you’re looking for an easy self-care app that allows you to do something relaxing so you spend less time mindlessly scrolling across social media feeds, coloring with an app like Colorfy might help—because I think it did help me.  

It definitely took me a few minutes to get in the flow of the app, fully let go, and become invested in Colorfy—a bit like starting a book. In the beginning I grew impatient and annoyed when making mistakes and it had the tendency to agitate rather than stabilize my mind. But once into a project, I wanted to continue because it felt good to accomplish something—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

There was no exercise I disliked, because I chose every project.

I did grow tired of the incessant ads popping up in the free version, though—it felt a bit overboard—but I don’t think the premium is worth the steep price tag of $9.99 a week when you could also go out and buy a physical coloring book and pencils for less than the cost of two weeks of Colorfy (for example, Amazon lists this Mindful Coloring book for just $6.99 and it will probably last you way longer than a week, as will these pencils for $5). On the other hand, for years I have had a drawer full of untouched coloring pencils and adult coloring books—so at least Colorfy actually got me coloring. 

I also think the app could update its visuals. Most available in the free version are pretty childish and cartoon-like, but honestly, a lot of images available behind the paywall once I upgraded to Colorfy Premium were too intricate and finely detailed for me to kick back and relax and enjoy. I would have preferred a happy medium. 

I went into this with very low expectations, so I wasn’t really disappointed with my experience.

Mindful coloring is an intentional activity that helps me pay attention to what I’m doing in the present moment, rather than functioning on autopilot.

Would I recommend the app? Yes. If someone is overstimulated by traditional phone activity, it’s a decent alternative. It definitely helped me to focus my mind as opposed to scattering my attention through endless social media scrolling—which is exactly what I was looking for.

26 july 2019