New Formulations: Film Premiere
Aicello introduces its first exfoliating facial soap film.
by Jennifer Kwok, Managing EditorWater-soluble films have slowly been gaining ground in the United States. As shown by products such as Listerine’s PocketPaks Breath Strips and Aveda’s Control Tape Extreme Style Strips hair gel, films are an innovative way to market a range of different types of products, including personal care items. In other countries, the popularity of beauty-product films has taken off. In Japan, for instance, films have been very popular for whitening, antiwrinkle, and oil-blotting products. Most recently, Japanese beauty brand P&PF partnered with Aicello (Vancouver, British Columbia), a manufacturer of film soaps for brand-name companies, to bring an exfoliating film soap to the Japanese market.
Since 1978, Aicello has manufactured hand soaps in film form using soluble resins and what it calls a “solution-casting process.” In 2005, Aicello worked with P&PF and the brand’s cosmetic soap formulations to launch Aicello’s first cosmetic-quality film, called Fusion Film. Aicello says that the newest version of Fusion Film is the first exfoliating film soap on the market.
Developing the exfoliating film took two years. “We have manufactured hand soaps for many years, but it took two years of extensive development to formulate Fusion Film,” says Carlton Wong, national sales manager for Aicello North America. “Facial soap is the most difficult soap to design film for. The film has to be soft and moisturizing and have no drying effect for any skin type.”
One of the biggest benefits of facial film soaps is that they deliver a measured product dose. This was important to P&PF because the brand’s mission is to market hypoallergenic products that don’t irritate the skin. According to Aicello and P&PF, most consumers use too much soap when cleaning their faces, which can dry out the skin. “Often, much more soap is used than is necessary to simply cleanse the face,” says Yoshinobu Saito, director of research and development for P&PF. “Irritation is not caused by the soap formulation itself, but by the quantity used. Women use on average 0.6 g of transparent soap bars at a time, and more than 2 g of cleansing agents may be used for paste-type products.” By comparison, each Fusion Film strip delivers a controlled, 0.3-g product dose.
P&PF developed a new, patented package for the exfoliating film. According to Saito, the main design concern was to ensure that the package would only dispense a single sheet at a time. In addition, the package had to protect the unused film from water and wet hands. “The most difficult design challenge was getting the package to consistently release a single sheet from the container,” says Saito. “Originally, we thought this would be easy to do, since our trials with sheets of paper posed no problems. But we found that two or three pieces would dispense when we changed the product from paper to soap-based films. Moreover, the early designs made the film soap tear and bend. We had a difficult time solving these problems. In the end, we finally came to a slide-type design.”
In total, P&PF went through 10 prototypes before arriving at the final design. The finalized package features a sliding button that customers can use to push a single sheet of film out of the package.
P&PF will continue to work with Aicello to bring new films to market. “Our cosmetic film products have the opportunity to become trendy as a product for the modern woman,” says Saito.