What we won't claim
Plenty of coloring books promise things the research does not support. Here is our list of sentences we will not print, and why each one is on it.
We keep this list because it is easier to trust a publisher that shows you where it stopped. Everything below is a claim we could have made and chose not to.
| We won’t say | Why not |
|---|---|
| “Clinically proven to reduce anxiety” | The calming evidence is real, but it is graded low-to-moderate quality and has not met a clinical-efficacy standard in a patient population. “Studies show” is honest. “Proven” is not. |
| “Mandala designs — scientifically shown to calm better than ordinary coloring” | Contradicted head-on. A 2022 meta-analysis of eight studies found no advantage over free drawing, and the founding experiment found mandalas and plaid did equally well. |
| “Improves focus and attention in children” | There is no peer-reviewed evidence for this in children. The attention findings people cite come from studies of adults. |
| “Boosts creativity” | Not established in either direction. We will not claim it, and we will not claim the reverse about anyone else's books either. |
| “A mindfulness practice” | Unguided coloring does not reliably raise measured mindfulness, and there is no controlled brain-imaging evidence for a meditative state. We will say a page has a meditative feel. That is a description, not a claim. |
| “Children who color score 15% higher on vocabulary tests” | A statistic of this shape circulates widely, attributed to a survey nobody can produce. We could not trace it to any source. We treat untraceable numbers as false. |
The wording rules we hold ourselves to
- Calm first, skills second — in that order, because that is the order the evidence supports.
- Coloring exercises or supports skills. It never improves, causes, or guarantees anything.
- We only describe activities a book actually contains. If a book has no draw-your-own pages, it does not get the activity-mix claim.
- Any number we print has to be checkable in the product — like the count of activity pages.
The full evidence base, graded, is on the research page. The reference list is on sources.