How to Survive Your Work Holiday Party While Pregnant

An Easy + Clean Egg Dye Hack

First, make some DIY slow cooker dividers with cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil.

Once your slow cooker is divided into four sections, line each section with saran wrap, plastic bags, or slow cooker liners. This will let you use more than one color, but still gives you enough space to dye multiple eggs at once!

Next, fill each section with water. Make sure that, while you want to fill them enough for multiple eggs to be submerged, you don't fill them too high. You don't want the water to overflow — that's definitely not mess-free!

Add your Easter egg dye to each section. Pink, purple, and blue are classic shades!

Gather your hard boiled or blown eggs to add to the water. You can use strips of tape or string to make all kinds of striped and dotted designs. Then all you have to do is just drop them in the water and wait! This is the perfect opportunity to make a colorful Easter cocktail ;).

The longer the eggs sit in the dye, the darker the color will turn out. So if you prefer pastel eggs, only leave them in for a few minutes.

When you remove your eggs from the dye, let them dry on a cookie rack before you remove the tape and the string. Display them on a pretty plate along with your Easter desserts, or as a centerpiece!

Voilà! A rainbow of colorful eggs, all boasting different designs. And the best part is, all you have to do to clean up is throw away the liners and the cardboard, then put your slow cooker back in your cabinet. We'll definitely be doing this from here on out.

How To Dye Easter Eggs: More Colored Egg Dye Ideas For Display

Marbled Nail Polish Eggs

If you're not too keen on buying food coloring that you'll only use every once in awhile, just use your nail polish! Instead of adding dye to the sections, pour in your polish. You can use a toothpick to swirl everything around and achieve that marbled look. Have some nail polish remover nearby because your fingers will get messy.

Mosaic Easter Eggs

This hack is a great option for using up hard boiled eggs because you have to peel one to make it! (AKA, you'll have a snack to accompany your DIY). After you peel an egg that you've already dyed, use a hot glue gun to attach the broken shell pieces to a second, plain egg. Easy-peasy.

Sharpie Tie Dye Eggs

This Easter egg design only takes ten minutes, which makes it perfect for busy evenings or for kids who can't sit still for too long. Fill your slow cooker sections with nail polish remover instead of water, then color your eggs with as many Sharpie colors as you want. Dunk them into the nail polish remover (or smear with a wet Q-tip) to give them that tie-dye look.

Housefront Easter Eggs

Paint your favorite TV characters' apartment building or your childhood home onto eggs for a fun and nostalgic DIY. Once you've drawn your design, you'll want to tape up the rest of the egg to make sure the dye stays where you want it. Paint the house with the egg dye, or submerge the whole egg in a slow cooker section. Set to dry.

Kit Kat Easter Miniatures

We already love Kit Kats as-is, but something about the mini bite size and pastel wrappers make us want to grab a whole handful! Snack on this Easter candy during the fam's annual egg hunt, or save a few for a midnight snack.

Williams-Sonoma Easter Jelly Beans

Whether you get your jelly beans at Williams-Sonoma or anywhere else, their springtime colors and flavors are arguably their most beloved. This bag makes for a fruity and colorful treat. Our love for these citrusy flavors has only grown with time!

Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs

The orange and brown Reese's wrappers are definitely iconic, but there is something extra springlike about rainbow tie dye ones! Pass the bowl of Easter candy full of this pick, please.

Cadbury Milk Chocolate Crème Eggs

Cadbury crème eggs are an Easter candy staple as far as we're concerned. They're so tasty and ooey-gooey, we wouldn't blame you if you finished the whole bowl by yourself.

Chocolove Easter Truffle Assortment

This gourmet box o' chocolates is the perfect Easter basket filler. With a mix of 10 sweet truffles from the likes of Coconut Ganache in White Chocolate and Lychee, Apricot & Passion Fruit Gelees in Ruby Chocolate (and more), this pick kicks the Easter candy game up a notch when it comes to quality and unique flavors! Of course, it's still chocolate, so we love it all the same.

Easter M&M's

This jumbo bag of pastel M&M's is the perfect thing to keep the living room candy dish stocked, or to just stash in your room. Both sound like good ideas to us!

Tony's Chocolonely Easter Egg Carton

This chocolatey Easter candy comes complete with eggs and a carton to hold 'em! In addition to your standard milk chocolate eggs, this medley also includes dark chocolate, caramel, hazelnut, almond, and sea salt. Yum!

Hershey's Polka Dot Cookies 'n Creme Eggs

Little bits of colorful cookie turn these chocolate eggs into an extra-festive treat that the Easter bunny himself would approve of! There's a good crunch and some creaminess, so each bite is balanced and super satisfying.

Hershey's Easter Kisses Milk Chocolate with Vanilla Frosting Crème

Add a little something extra to your regular Hershey's Kiss experience with these vanilla frosting-filled bites. These would also make excellent Easter cookie toppers!

Sour Patch Kids Bunnies

Swap your usual Sour Patch Kids for these cute bunny shapes instead. You'll get the same burst of flavor, just cuter shapes! The kids will also adore them and get a kick out of their sour, then sweet quality.

Skittles Original Easter Jellybeans

Skittles and jelly beans never disappoint, and when you put them together, you just get double the fruity goodness. This is such a cute Easter candy to have since it's shaped like eggs!

Lindt Easter Mini Carrot

We love that this box is filled with individually-wrapped chocolate candies you can share with the whole fam! Plus, the carrot packaging is just too cute!

SmartSweets Berry Bunnies Easter Candy

Indulge in your fave Easter gummies with these adorable SmartSweets gummy bunnies, which only have 3 grams of sugar in the entire bag! They have a delightfully juicy berry taste for fun snacking. Berry not your thing? They also have some egg-shaped Easter gummies with a tropical twist.

Peeps Easter Milk Chocolate Dipped Strawberry Delights Chicks

These are the Peeps you know and love, just dipped in chocolate. Yes, please. Snack on a few as-is, or use this pack to make our stellar Peeps S'mores!

Compartés Chocolate Dipped Easter Bunny Peeps

Alternatively, if you prefer, you can find bunny-shaped Peeps dipped in chocolate, too! These quintessential marshmallow Easter treats are smothered in milk and dark chocolates to switch things up.

Endangered Species Chocolate Hello Spring Mix

These adorable butterfly, tulip, and bee-shaped chocolates make the ultimate semi-sweet snack when it comes to Easter candy, They recall the spring season in the tastiest way ever!

Lindt Easter Milk Chocolate Gold Bunny

You can't forget the chocolate bunny at Easter! As kids, we were always excited that Easter was an excuse to eat more chocolate than normal, bunny ears and all. If the bunny is hollow, the better.

Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bunnies

If you prefer to eat your chocolate bunny in smaller portions, these miniature bunnies from Hershey's are just as tasty!

Yulin Kuang's Journey To "How To End A Love Story"

Some people seem to be born knowing they're destined to right, but some of us stumble into it and realize, "Hey, I'm pretty good at this." For Yulin, her journey to her debut novel How to End a Love Story takes the latter route. Her first dream, you make ask? To be an Olympic figure skater.

"...that didn't pan out so I turned to storytelling," Yulin admits. That pivot led her to set her sights on becoming an author as she began honing her creative writing skills via your classic marble composition notebooks. If you're still wondering if she kept some of them, the answer is yes!

The screenwriter and author then found herself drawn to other aspects of writing and film. She says, "I eventually fell in love with screenwriting and directing while in undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and I spent my first decade post-grad concentrating on my filmmaking career."

Yulin Kuang's Approach To Filmmaking

It's a reason why her hard work and the stars aligned for her to adapt Emily Henry's Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation.

When I ask what helps her approach the book-to-film trajectory, she credits writing fan fiction. This feels similar to Christina Lauren's own experience, further proving that fan fiction deserves the utmost praise for helping some of the best literary and film minds who ultimately birth what I could only describe as masterpieces.

Yulin says, "Fan fiction is where I first learned you could play with characters originated by someone else to discover what you’d make them do in your own version." Although it would be easy for anyone to snap their fingers and have their first pitches accepted by everyone, she learned to lean on what writing fan fiction taught her.

"Early in my career, I would pitch on book-to-film adaptations and I’d be like, 'Change nothing, just shoot the book!' And I wouldn’t get those jobs, because I didn’t have a clear “take” and because you can’t actually just shoot a book – adaptation is an art form unto itself. So onceI started approaching adaptation with more of a fan fiction mindset – 'What is my take on these characters and this world?' – that helped me approach the book-to-screen trajectory more successfully," she proudly says.

However, this doesn't mean she never questioned if she could still find ways to create new ideas. "...in 2021, at a time when everything else I was working on was an adaptation, I found myself wondering if I had anything original left within me," she remembers.

It's natural for creatives to experience moments of doubt, but Yulin has been able to turn the tide and discover untapped ideas in her mind. Just don't expect her to set her own expectations about any adaptations she's working on.

She says, "Know that I am an avid reader of romance and a frequent consumer of this genre across mediums, and I will be bringing everything I know going into these adaptations. But more specifically to Beach Read, which I have more creative ownership over as the writer/director."

How Yulin Kuang Relates To Her Main Characters In "How To End A Love Story"

And since How to End a Love Story is truly Yulin's own creative body of work, it makes sense that main characters Helen and Grant have pieces of her personality as well as her characteristics.

"I gave Helen all my hopes and insecurities from high school and gave her the alternate universe path where I had pursued publishing instead of Hollywood. I examined what might have happened if I’d grown into certain qualities I’ve actively tried to grow away from," she says of Helen Zhang.

Right away, readers get the sense that Helen is a whip-smart and hardworking, but her penchant for being cautious about her success also peeks through. Though she's written highly successful YA (read: young adult) novels, Helen waits with bated breath for the moment people will call her bluff. She's relatable because many of us wonder if we're simply cosplaying as versions of ourselves who've reached any level of success.

On the other hand, there's Grant Shepard. He's seemingly this cool, calm, and collected screenwriter who has a complicated past with Helen. Yulin says, "I gave Grant a lot of the qualities I’m proud of and/or have coveted as a working screenwriter, and I certainly relate to many of his thoughts on screenwriting and the current state of our industry."

The more the reader learns about Helen and Grant, the more it becomes obvious that there's more to them than meets the eye. Sure, they are complicated...but who isn't?

"At their core, Helen and Grant are just two kids from Jersey trying to make it in Hollywood, and of course I relate deeply to that," she says.

Yulin Kuang's View Of Rom-Coms

Based on Yulin's genuine interest in romance novels and the fact she's well-versed in adapting them, she knows what it takes to make rom-coms flourish. Her first take? "Romantic tension is key to any romance – I always need to know why our couple can’t be together now. The second that tension is gone, so is audience interest," she points out.

This explains why we can't get enough of reading books about it, listening to albums dedicated to it, or watching films that depict all levels of romance. Still, there are some people who approach the genre with a side eye.

"There seems to be a natural human suspicion of things that make us feel too good – like, 'That can’t possibly be good for us, that’s just candy!' I wonder if it’s something evolutionary at work," she says before doubling down. "You can’t argue with the fact that people absolutely fucking love rom-coms, and I will die on the hill that a well-earned happily ever after is both harder to achieve and more narratively satisfying when it’s pulled off successfully."

She's the type of writer who really appreciates a big kiss that's handled correctly onscreen, but she's also not afraid to "groan every time it's fumbled." But, she knows everyone still won't see romance the way she and so many others view it, but she doesn't really care.

"Ultimately, I don’t concern myself too much with changing minds that don’t want to be changed.There are enough smart people who recognize the power and value of rom-coms, and I’d rather spend my precious time creating art to surprise and delight the people with good taste."

Need I say that this is yet another reason why How to End a Love Story works so well?

How Yulin Kuang Wishes The World Would Celebrate AAPI Month

As much as she's vocal about screenwriting and rom-coms, Yulin also has thoughts about the way society-at-large talks about BIPOC creative artists. "There’s a real, 'This is important, eat your vegetables,' vibe to things. And while that might be true, it’s not the most appealing way to market or discover art," she says.

She admits this could be due to how many diversity-in-film panels she's attended. As a Black woman, the conversations I see every year during Black History Month seem to have a certain "Let's check this box so everyone can be happy" vibe, so I can imagine attending panels about diversity and inclusion can start to sound repetitive after awhile.

Yulin doesn't hold back when she says, "I’m a little jaded when people ask me diversity questions at this point. I don’t want to attract the kind of readers who are only showing up to be supportive of my Asian-ness. It’s a bit like showing up to a date where someone says, 'I’m so excited that you’re Asian!!!'" This is an analogy I can so get behind because it makes a lot of sense!

It's one thing to have representation, but I like to think it's always obvious when people are approaching the conversation in a way that 'others' BIPOC people. We're literally not asking for a trophy, but more so an acknowledgement that we shouldn't be excluded from conversations, spaces, and careers or treated differently.

This sentiment is shared by Yulin who says, "That’s the thing about me that I didn’t do on purpose, and while I’m glad you’re excited, I hope there are things that I did do on purpose that you find exciting, too" and feels there is a way to be a genuine ally.

"...support AAPI creatives by all means, and perhaps begin by celebrating us as individual artists even after the designated month ends. And where applicable, talk about our work like it’s candy, not vegetables. I’d rather be irresistible than important," she states.

Take a page from Yulin Kuang's book and pick up a copy of How to End a Love Story today! You won't regret it!