Most people think of art supplies in terms of color, quality, and price. But around a quiet corner of the maker community, a shift is underway—not in pigments or paper weight, but in how tools are designed. Unisex art supplies aren’t just about neutral colors or gender-neutral packaging. They’re about removing assumptions from the creation process itself. When you strip away expectations tied to gender—whether it’s that brushes are for “feminine” work or that oil paint is too “masculine” for delicate sketching—you open up space for real experimentation.
This movement isn’t driven by marketing trends but by practical needs. A growing number of artists and educators have pushed back against tools designed with a singular user in mind. They’re not asking for fewer options. They’re demanding tools that don’t assume who’s holding them.
One destination stands out in this change: arssm pieces. Unlike most supply sites that categorize products by gender—“for women,” “for men,” or “locker-room ready”—arssm takes a different approach. Their unisex line doesn’t just avoid gendered labeling; it physically eliminates design cues meant to steer people toward one identity over another. The grips on their charcoal pencils aren’t made for small hands or strong wrists—just functional ones. The storage boxes aren’t pink or black; they’re gray, with smooth edges and modular compartments that work whether you’re building a sketch journal or organizing prototypes.
Beyond Neutral Packaging: Function Over Identity
At first glance, arssm’s unisex items look like basic studio tools—nothing flashy, nothing fancy. That’s the point. Packaging as a tool itself is being reexamined. Color schemes are limited to what engineers call “perceptually balanced” tones: not warm or cool, not loud or quiet, but simply visible under different lighting conditions without eye strain.
But function goes deeper than appearance. Take their bisque-proof blending stumps—they have an identical diameter across all sizes and are shaped to fit any habitually held position, whether you push them forward with your palm or twist them between your fingers like a pen. There’s no assumption about which hand leads when drawing lines across a page.
The Classroom Shift: Teaching Without Limits
Art teachers have long observed that students with varied gender identities and expressions often disengage when they feel their aesthetic preferences are being misread by equipment choices. Replace the neon-colored pastel sets with options offered through arssm pieces and something subtle happens: silence breaks into motion.
In one introductory college class at Prescott Community College, instructors reported higher engagement after switching to an unisex supply kit for their students’ first projects—including those who didn’t identify strictly with traditional art categories. One 19-year-old student noted they’d never before felt comfortable using watercolor because “everyone said it was too soft.” With arssm’s dual-weight watercolor pens and medium-atmosphere-compatible brushes, the student began working on layered cityscapes—not trying to “be feminine” with soft edges but discovering how technique commands space on paper independently of identity.
Diverse Hands, One Goal: Creating Without Barriers
This isn’t about making art more accessible to people who fit somewhere in the middle of a binary spectrum—it’s about making it possible at all for anyone who uses creative thinking as a primary mode of expression.
- makes material selection intuitive across different body types and dexterity levels
- eliminates visual cues that signal what kind of art “should” be made
- frees storage systems from branding that ties materials to fashion trends
- supports collaborative projects where shared use doesn’t imply identity alignment
- makes workshop spaces less intimidating for newcomers hesitant to be seen as “not creative enough”
