The party ring is a British biscuit

Biscuit

A biscuit is a baked, edible, and commonly flour-based product. The term is used to apply to two distinctly different products in North America and the Commonwealth Nations....

 first made by Fox's Biscuits in 1983. It is a circular biscuit with a central finger-sized hole. On top of this is a layer of hard coloured icing

Icing (food)

Icing, also called frosting in the United States, is a sweet often creamy glaze made of sugar with a liquid such as water or milk, that is often enriched with ingredients such as butter, egg whites, cream cheese, or flavorings and is used to cover or decorate baked goods, such as cakes or cookies...

 with "wiggly" lines in a different colour. The five colour combinations are:

• Orange icing with white lines
• Pink icing with white lines
• Pink icing with yellow lines
• Purple icing with yellow lines
• Yellow icing with pink lines

Party rings were a product of the 1980s fashion for the newly developed chemical food dye system that enabled more lavish colours to be incorporated into the manufacture of biscuits. This made them a very popular choice for children's parties, where not only could the colours amuse, but the holes in the middle enabled them to be placed on a finger, often resulting in "ring races". These involved each child taking five rings and placing one on each finger of a hand. They would then proceed to eat them as fast as possible, with the inevitable danger of biting a finger a bit too hard.

The crisp, hard sheen on the icing is because of the use of carob bean gum — the carob, or locust bean, is also sometimes used as a chocolate

Chocolate

Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...

 substitute.

Because of the demographic popularity of the product, most "party ring children" are now of university age or older, and many universities have societies to appreciate such confectionery items. These societies came to notoriety in 1999 when Fox's Biscuits changed the packaging of party rings, causing petitions, heavy leafleting campaigns and a sit-in outside their production plant in Batley

Batley

Batley is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, England. It lies southeast of Bradford, southwest of Leeds and north of Dewsbury, near the M62 motorway. It has a population of 49,448 . Other nearby towns include Morley to the northeast, Ossett to the southeast...

, West Yorkshire

West Yorkshire

West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of 2.2 million. West Yorkshire came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972....

. A standard pack of party rings consists of a long plastic tray containing five biscuit wells, each holding four biscuits of the same pattern, making twenty biscuits per pack. Fox's decided to remove the purple/yellow biscuit because the dyes used had been linked to certain health problems. Instead of replacing them, they removed them completely, leaving only sixteen biscuits per pack. Through their determination, the university societies not only managed to have the purple/yellow biscuit reinstated (using newer, safer dyes), but many societies received a letter of apology from the managing director of Fox's Biscuits.

Halloween Edition

In 2008, a Halloween edition in an orange and black plastic tub was produced. It contained the following two Halloween-themed colour variations:

• Orange icing with black lines
• Black icing with orange lines