Cosmetic/Personal Care Packaging.

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Cosmetic Feature: Distinct Decorating

Cartons That Shine

This year, Jean Paul Gaultier's holiday fragrance cartons truly sparkle. The battery-operated lights that adorn the carton lids are an unexpected sight intended to captivate customers this season.

"This year's holiday cartons were designed to reflect a Christmas theme," says Virginie Mory Ducrocq, strategic operational marketing director for Beauté Prestige International, licensee of the Jean Paul Gaultier beauty brand.

For the Christmas motif, luminous lights were patterned to depict a winter landscape as well as to spell out the Jean Paul Gaultier and fragrance logos. "The lights twinkle animatedly when the customer pushes the lid," says Ducrocq. The lights were tinted red to match the carton for Classique, yellow for Fragile, and blue for Le Male.

Compacts with Chic

Conventional techniques like metallizing and embossing certainly enhance compacts. However, embellishments less commonly seen can be even more striking.

Estée Lauder had a jewel of an idea when the company decided in 1963 to adorn a pressed-powder compact with crystals. Since the Evening Compact's debut, Estée Lauder has introduced roughly 16 different crystal-clad compacts each year, often as limited editions for holidays and special promotions like the Pink Ribbon compact for National Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Fashioned to hold either solid perfume or refillable pressed powder, the compacts have been shaped as various animals, a circus tent, and the American flag. This holiday season's compact is a sand castle that houses Estée Lauder's Beautiful solid perfume.

The brass compacts are decorated with colored lacquer and crystals sourced from Austria-based jeweler Swarovski. Designs are done in-house by Estée Lauder's team led by John Fling, vice president of design. Suppliers include Leif Lowe Ltd. (Kowloon, Hong Kong) for the pressed-powder compacts and Victoria Creations for the solid- perfume compacts.

The compacts' upscale look reflects their high-end production expense. "The crystals are applied to the compacts by hand, one stone at a time," says Peggy Hoy, vice president of package development for Estée Lauder. "The hand-painted lacquer is also labor-intensive."

Though the crystals are a more expensive way to decorate, "the jewels enhance the compacts' value," says Hoy. "Many of our customers buy them as gifts, or as collectibles for personal use."

High-impact decoration doesn't always need to be high-priced. Compacts covered with custom-printed paperboard or specialty materials, for instance, can attract customers because such packages are not typical in the marketplace. For the October launch of its Lip Hits lip gloss sets, Linda Cantello chose AGI/ Klearfold's (New York City) Vista Image compact, which the packaging supplier introduced this year. The compact's injection-molded trays can be wrapped with printed paperboard, rigid plastic film, or laminates made from fabric, foil, or leather. The substrates can be decorated with offset or silk-screen printing, process-printed photographic images, various coatings, and hot stamping.

The Lip Hits compact was wrapped with solid-bleached sulfate paperboard that was finished with a pearlized varnish. "The compact is lightweight and portable," says Millie Donado, new product development representative for Surface Beauty, which coordinated the Lip Hits package production.

The paperboard covering the compact's base was die-cut so that the nine lip gloss shades in the clear tray could be seen clearly through the compact's base. "Being able to see the product shades without actually opening the compact is convenient for customers," says Donado. For added convenience, the underside of the compact's lid was metallized to serve as a mirror.

"Printing graphics on [paperboard-covered] compacts opens a new world of marketing possibilities that are not possible with traditional plastic or metal compacts," says Patrick McGee, marketing manager for AGI/Klearfold, a MeadWestvaco Resource.

Colorful Finishes

Color can be a package's most noticeable decorative feature. Add shimmer and bubbly finishes, and you have colorful packages that are sometimes so visually effective, additional graphics may be unnecessary.

For instance, Passport LLC (San Francisco) retails simply-shaped packages devoid of graphics, except for the Passport logo. What stands out are the packages' bright colors in translucent and iridescent finishes. "The light colors and translucent packages create a fresh look to inspire a travel-weary customer," says Erin Cotter, Passport's founder and creative director.

For its September-launched Destination Lip Tint, the company chose Techpack–Cosmetech Mably International's (New York City) Shimmer finish to enhance the Lip Tint's purple plastic stock container. The finish combined a pearly pink color spray and a clear UV varnish, creating an iridescent tint that shimmers attractively under light.

"We tried to update the minimalistic container by infusing it with bright color for a fun, whimsical look," says Cotter. "Since the container's shape is sleek, the package also maintains a sophisticated look."

Suppliers like Clariant's Masterbatches Division (Charlotte, NC) specialize in innovating new effects for colorful resins. This fall, the supplier introduced its Foam Etching technique for multilayer polyethylene and polypropylene bottles.

Foam Etching creates a textured, bubbly finish that can range from a subtle frost to a soft, leathery look. The effect is achieved by introducing a blend of Hydrocerol microcellular foaming agent into the outer layer structure of the container. During the extrusion and blow-molding cycle, the microfoam bubbles near the surface distort and break to create a texture.

"Foam Etching eliminates a company's need to perform a secondary decorating procedure on a package, because we create the decorative effect as we're forming the container," says Len Kulka, director of creative development for Clariant Masterbatches.

Personal Touches

Sometimes even the smallest detail can help make a product feel more special to customers. With this in mind, some cosmetic companies are providing packages with accessories that customers can personalize.

For instance, American Eagle Outfitters' (Warrendale, PA) Aura fragrance bottle comes with three decorative rings that can be interchanged by the customer. Designed to reflect Aura's tag line, "one fragrance, three individual auras," the blue, green, and pink rings are not only decorative, but are designed to suit a customer's changing moods.

"The customer can interact with the product by personalizing the bottle," says Ray Jones, a consultant with International Resource Services, which helped American Eagle Outfitters develop the September- launched Aura fragrance.

In order to be easily removable, the rings were molded from flexible thermoplastic elastomer. For supplier Risdon-AMS (Watertown, CT), working with the soft material wasn't easy. "When the rings are ready to come out of the mold, they are soft and gummy and tend to stick to the mold's core pin," says Steve Levine, vice president and senior operations officer for Risdon-AMS, which also supplied Aura's Surlyn cap. The supplier's technology made it possible to remove the rings from the mold while preserving the elastomer.

San Francisco–based manufacturer reflect.com specializes in customizing both its products and packages based on customers' answers to an on-line questionnaire. "Personalizing a package makes the product feel more special to a customer," says Ralph Comegna, director of supply logistics for reflect.com.

The company's hair- and skin-care bottles and jars are decorated with two mock gemstones, one of which can be selected from eight choices, including amber, diamond, and emerald. To mimic the look of a precious gemstone, a clear epoxy- resin piece is affixed to a colored label that shows through the clear resin. For additional personalization, text provided by the customer can be printed on the label. Hydome (Windsor, CA) supplies the epoxy resin piece, and Flexcon (Spencer, MA) supplies the label stock, which is die-cut into labels by converter York Label (York, PA).

Customizing each package requires careful production planning by Comegna, designing by Alice Au, and packaging development by Art Feldman. The laser-printed labels and the epoxy resin are hand-adhered to the packages in-house by reflect.com staff. "We have all of the pieces ready to go," says Comegna. "After downloading orders from the Web site each day, we assemble each package individually. This kind of customized decoration can't be mass produced."

Filling Packages with Pizzazz

Product filling isn't typically thought of as a decorating technique. However, cosmetic products filled in eye-catching patterns can certainly enhance a package's image.

Physician's Formula (Azusa, CA) has used patterns to decorate many of its products, such as a poem etched on its Skinsitive powder, animal-skin prints for its Jungle Fever powders, and sun and moon designs on its Summer Eclipse powders. The company has repeated the decorating technique for its newest launches. The Les Botaniques face powders are filled to resemble various flowers, while the Retro Glow face powders and eye shadows are embossed with a cameo design.

Suppliers like product formulator and manufacturer DMI (Wharton, NJ) have developed new, visually exciting products. "For example, a clear package is a good choice to showcase a product with unique design features," says Nancy Duvinski, director of marketing and new business development for DMI. "Some manufacturers design the product and packaging to play off each other. For instance, if the product is filled in the shape of a flower, the lid can be printed with a flower stem."

This year, DMI introduced a proprietary formulation that has already gained attention. DMI's OptiJel cosmetic base adds three-dimensional effects to products such as lip gloss and solid fragrance. This dramatic effect carries all the way through the product and plays off the black background of the package.

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