Mechanical pencils are the quiet upgrade in a pencil case. No shavings in the bottom of a backpack, no stub that has to be retired by November, just a click and a fresh point that writes the same on the first page and the hundredth. The Point Made pencils from OOLY earn their name, and they are the kind of small, cheerful object that makes a math worksheet marginally more tolerable. They land well across a lot of desks: a middle schooler doing homework, a teacher grading at the kitchen table, an adult roughing in shapes before committing to ink. Add them to a back to school supplies haul, tuck one into a teacher gift, or park a few in the arts and crafts for kids bin so that nobody has to go hunting for the sharpener again. Refillable beats disposable, every single time, and a pencil that never needs sharpening is one fewer reason to get up from the desk mid-thought.
How do you put lead in a mechanical pencil? On most mechanical pencils you remove the cap or eraser at the top and drop replacement lead down the barrel, then click the mechanism several times to feed it through to the tip. Lead is sold by diameter and a refill must match the pencil, commonly 0.5mm or 0.7mm for fine writing leads and 2mm for thicker sketching leads.
