The festival of colours is here. If the only reason you are planning to shut yourself up in your room for the day is fear of the chemicals used in the colours, Team YOU has a solution. Make your own gulal and wet colours at home. That way you can go chemical-free without shelling out a bomb for natural colours. And, who knows, you might find the making part as fun as the playing part. All you need to invest is a little time.

YELLOW

• For gulal or dry colour, add turmeric powder or haldi to gram flour or besan in 1:2 ratio. You can also substitute besan with atta, maida, rice flour, arrowroot powder or even talcum powder. Add a few drops of essential oil (orange, lemon or sandalwood) for fragrance. If you have time, dry flowers such as amaltas, marigold or yellow chrysanthemum in the shade and crush them to obtain a fine, yellow powder. The dried rind of the bael or wood apple also yields a yellow powder.

• For wet colour, boil raw turmeric in water. You can also boil marigolds or amaltas flowers in water and keep them soaked overnight for a festive yellow. If Flame of the Forest flowers - palash in Bengali and tesu in Hindi - are boiled in water and left to soak overnight, you get a rich orange colour that can be further diluted. Dried palash flowers also yield an orange powder.

GREEN

• Mix dried and crushed leaves of the mehendi bush (henna powder) with an equal quantity of flour for a lovely green colour. Just make sure that the henna powder is not mixed with amla powder (to be used on hair); this gives a brown colour.

• Grind any green leaves - spinach, coriander, mint. Mix the paste with water and then strain it. You can also boil neem leaves to get a green colour that is good for your skin.

RED

• Collect a bag of red hibiscus flowers, dry them and powder for a red gulal. You can also mix raktachandan powder with flour for a fragrant but expensive red. The easiest way to make chemical-free red colour is adding food colour to rice flour in the right proportion, adding a little water to make a thick paste and letting it dry. Then blend it in a grinder for powdered red.

• Dice a beetroot and add it to a big vessel of water. Boil until the liquid becomes a dark reddish-magenta. You can dilute it with more water for a pretty pink shade.

BROWN

• If you'd rather go dark than bright, this recipe is just for you. Mix one part henna powder with four parts amla powder and a bit of turmeric for a brown gulal that washes off yellow. This is where you can put to use the henna powder your mom puts in her hair.

• Get kattha or khair from a paan shop and mix it with water for dark brown. Mixing all the liquid colours given above will also give you a brownish shade.

What are you waiting for? Go, collect your stuff and get ready for doljatra. Happy Holi all!