Crayola announced it was retiring its yellow Dandelion crayon from its classic 24-pack a day early, thanks to a Twitter leak.

“Our beloved Dandelion decided to announce his retirement early! There’s no taming an adventurous spirit!” Crayola Tweeted Thursday along with a video featuring an animated Dandelion crayon reflecting on his adventurous “career.” This apparently included speaking many languages, going to space, hang-gliding over the Great Wall of China and sitting on lions.

The Dandelion crayon has been on Crayola’s roster for 27 years and part of the 24-pack for 18.

Crayola had spent days advertising that the colour retirement announcement would happen during a livestream Friday, National Crayon Day, but that plan was redrawn when Twitter user @frankieinternet found a prematurely-stocked 120-pack of crayons at Target with the message “Dandelion is retiring! Get it NOW!” on the box and began Tweeting out photos of it.

This is the first time the company is retiring a colour from the 24-pack. In an email, Crayola product marketing and communications manager Margot Somerville said Dandelion will also be retired across all crayon products.

Crayola will be replacing Dandelion with a new colour, to be announced in May barring any leaks, and will also be running a naming contest for the new shade. The new crayon box in the Twitter photo advertised the contest on top of a blue crayon, but Crayola declined to comment on whether the new crayon will be a shade of blue or if the blue crayon was just used to illustrate things.

Toronto design and colour expert Andrea Colman, principal designer and owner of Fine Finishes Design Inc., said the elimination of Dandelion was “a little surprising.”

“There were other ones that I would have thought would’ve gotten the boot before Dandelion, for sure,” said Colman. She noted there are already far fewer shades of yellow in the box compared to reds or blues.

Among her top picks for “retirement” were White, which only works well on dark paper, Green Yellow, which produces a colour Colman agreed was reminiscent of bile, and either Blue Green and Cerulean, which look “virtually identical.”

As for Dandelion’s replacement, Colman said she’s hoping that a vibrant shade of green will be added to the mix.

“You know the (colour of) fresh buds on the trees? It’s very inspiring and it’s the symbol of rebirth, like everything’s going to be good again, that life is good, life goes on, life perseveres . . . We’re also leaving a planet to our children that isn’t in very good shape and they are the ones right now who are using the crayons,” she said.

“I just think that there just aren’t greens in the box, and I think you can’t have enough green.”