As an artist we tend to want the best. I like to sharpen my charcoal pencils with a blade so this already tends to my needs. You may get a few pencils that were dropped during packaging or shipping. However they are great but handling needs to be very delicate for charcoal and you shouldn’t expect the best while buying any type of charcoal materials. Some may constantly break while sharpening and can get extremely annoying but what do you expect when it’s so brittle compared to oil pencils. It’s definitely for beginners and I could work with these amazingly well. For reference I added a picture so you can see what you can do with these pencils. That was when I was 70% complete with it. Just patience and practice. You don’t need the best of tools to create art. They definitely helped and made it easier to complete this and I believe these pencils are beneficial for anyone.