Colouring books usually belong to the softest corners of our memories. They remind us of childhood afternoons where the biggest crisis was choosing between sky blue or dark blue.
We think of them as harmless, cheerful, uncomplicated things. Pages filled with wide-eyed animals, swirls of flowers, happy shapes that never ask much of us beyond staying (mostly) inside the lines.
They’re symbols of safety. Of softness. Of a world too gentle to bruise.
Which is exactly why Melanie Martinez’s colouring book feels like a plot twist no one saw coming.
The Cry Baby Colouring Book arrived years ago, quietly, almost like a secret passed hand-to-hand among fans. And now, nearly a decade later, it has slipped back into the spotlight, pulling in a whole new wave of curiosity and controversy.
The Artist Behind the Pastel World
Melanie Martinez — whether you’ve followed her for years or only know her through the algorithm — has always created music the way a child might build a dollhouse: intentionally, symbolically, with tiny, delicate details that reveal themselves the longer you stare.
Cry Baby, the ghostly darling at the core of her debut album, isn’t just a persona. She’s a little mirror. Emotional. Overwound. Wide-eyed. A childlike version of the feelings most of us experienced long before we had the vocabulary for them.
Melanie’s universe has always lived in the space between cotton-candy softness and razor-edged truth. Songs like “Dollhouse,” “Sippy Cup,” and “Training Wheels” wrap their messages in pastel imagery but leave a sting. It’s a fairytale meets fallout. Nursery rhyme meets emotional reality.
So in her hands, a colouring book becomes something entirely different. Not an escape from reality, but an invitation to sit with it.
Inside the Cry Baby Pages
The book was never designed as a craft project or a piece of nostalgic merchandise. It was a paper portal into Cry Baby’s world, a visual companion to the album, allowing its themes to live off the screen and outside the music.
Every page carries symbols pulled from her songs. Baby bottles hint at emotional dependence. Toy blocks wobble under unseen pressure. Cry Baby’s iconic teardrops look adorable at first glance, but once you understand the album’s emotional terrain, they sit heavier on the page.
From afar, the drawings look sugary. But when you begin colouring, the metaphors reveal themselves. You realise quickly that nothing in Melanie’s universe is ever just cute. Everything is coded. Emotion hides in every outline, waiting for your pencil to wake it up.
And suddenly, colouring becomes less about shading shapes and more about finishing sentences she started.
It becomes surprisingly intimate, like journaling without words.
2025’s Online Pastel Storm
This year, the book resurfaced on TikTok and Instagram, sparking a wave of opinions as loud as they are divided. Some people adore it. Others aren’t sure how to feel. And some are convinced it’s outright unsettling.
Fans call it beautiful, nostalgic, a soft place for heavy feelings. They see it as a creative comfort object, a little art project for the inner child who never had the space to speak. Many say colouring it feels like tending to memories they thought they’d outgrown.
Critics saw something else. They pointed to specific illustrations and called them disturbing. Some even accused the book of promoting harmful imagery without context, echoing headlines that labelled the art irresponsible or inappropriate.
Many of these debates emerged from isolated screenshots, images stripped from the story they were built to tell. Without the narrative, metaphors flatten, and symbolism becomes a shock rather than a layer.
Both sides have a point. And that’s exactly why the book has gone viral again.
Because it makes people feel something.
Because it refuses to sit quietly on a shelf and behave like a “normal” colouring book.
Beyond the Colouring Lines
Art changes as time passes through it. New eyes bring new interpretations, sensitivities, and questions. The Cry Baby Colouring Book endures because it doesn’t try to offer clean answers or easy meaning. Instead, it opens a door and lets each person who enters decide how they feel.
Maybe that’s its true power.
It reminds us that innocence is not always pure and adulthood is not always detached. That childhood toys sometimes carry the heaviest memories. That adult emotions sometimes need soft pastel colours to make sense. And healing can look like a page half-coloured, paused mid-thought, waiting for you to return when you’re ready.
It asks a simple, unsettling question:
“What do you see when you colour your own story?”
And perhaps that’s why people keep talking about it, because a colouring book that sparks a conversation about the human condition is, by definition, more than paper and ink.
It is a little world.
A little mirror.
A reminder that the lines we grew up colouring were never as innocent as they seemed.
Don’t stop at one shade. TMS mixes culture, feelings, and pop into new colours every week.