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Sharon,
I wouldn't go so far as to pitch the entire set, but I'd certainly test them, and find more lightfast replacements for the colors that fade unacceptably.
After you have run your own tests and seen what fades and how quickly, it would be well to write the manufacturers of whichever pastels fared poorly and let them know how disappointed you are that they chose fade-prone pigments for those colors. That will put the pressure on them to improve their products.
Regarding the Golden Lightfastness Test Kit, I recommend using Wallis paper (white) instead of the sheets included in the kit, and making your sample swatches larger than the boxes printed on those sheets. My swatches are 1 1/4" x 2 1/2", so with one half covered by a mask and the other half exposed to the sun, I have two 1 1/4" squares side by side for easy comparison. Leave sufficient space between samples to keep one color from contaminating another. I found it necessary to draw the excess dust from each sample into a vacuum cleaner nozzle held directly above the sample, when preparing my test sheets. I used heavy black paper for the masks covering half of each sample, and separated the mask from the pastel with glassine paper cut to the same dimensions as the mask. I stuck the test sheets and masks on foam-core board with push-pins. On one of the sheets I pinned a Blue Wool Card, supplied in the kit, with half of it covered with a mask. The kit has good instructions. The hardest part is preparing the test sheets. After that, it's just a matter of placing them in a window that gets full sun, looking at them every few days to see what has faded, and writing down what we see.
The manufacturers really ought to be doing this testing themselves, and making the results available, reported truthfully, but unless pastel artists insist, it will not likely happen. The long-standing (and erroneous) belief among pastel advocates that pastels are a permanent medium is precisely what has allowed manufacturers to get away with giving us fade-prone pastels. That needs to change.
Virgil Elliott
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