Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Cosmetics
Flawless Face Case
Flawless Face Case, iQUAD
by Bare Escentuals
When it comes to packaging loose powder, one challenge that marketers face is making it travel-friendly. Typical jars with sifters are great for use at home, but when carried around in a purse can become messy. This was an important dilemma for Bare Escentuals to address because the brand’s entire i.d. bareMinerals makeup line comprises loose-powder mineral makeup. “Loose powder by nature tends to either leak or spill out of a component,” says Sarina Godin, director of product development for Bare Escentuals. “One of our main priorities is to find ways to make loose powder more convenient for customers to travel with.”
The brand’s Flawless Face Case and iQUAD compacts feature internal powder chambers with hinged, airtight lids that help keep powder sealed in. Flawless Face Case holds Bare Escentuals’ bareMinerals SPF 15 foundation, while iQUAD houses four shades of mineral eye shadow. HCT Packaging (Bridgewater, NJ) supplies both packages.
The outside of the compacts are made from a blend of SAN and ABS, while the inside of the compacts and the individual chamber lids are polypropylene. Both compacts also hold a brush—a mini Kabuki brush for the foundation and an eye shadow brush for iQUAD—so that the brushes don’t have to be carried loose.
Flawless Face Case retails empty. Customers can remove the sifter and refill the compact with powder from the foundation’s retail jar. “This way, you can keep some of the foundation at home and just take the compact with you for touch-ups any time,” says Godin.
Tim Thorpe, HCT Packaging’s West Coast president, says that engineering a removable sifter that would stay snugly put in the compact and yet be removable during refilling was challenging. HCT fashioned the polypropylene sifter with a rotator that keeps powder from rising to the top of the power chamber, ensuring that powder doesn’t spill when the consumer removes the sifter. “No one has produced a removable rotating sifter before.,” says Thorpe. HCT also added cogs on the sifter’s rim and a finger ledge that makes removing the sifter easier.
The iQUAD is Bare Escentuals’ version of a quad eye shadow compact. Each shadow is housed in its own PCTA pot. Holes in the bottom of the compact allow the clear pots and the eye shadows in them to show through. “The styling for iQUAD reminds me of a turn-of-the-century painter’s case,” says panelist Dennis Furniss, vice president of strategic branding and design for Kaleidoscope.
iQuad
One of the challenges with both iQUAD and Flawless Face Case was ensuring that each individual lid sealed tightly enough to keep powder in but was easy for customers to open. Another challenge was keeping the compacts’ profiles as slim as possible while accommodating the individual product wells.
On both compacts, the individual lids are lined with a proprietary material that helps break powder down. (One of Bare Escentuals’ slogans for product application is, “Swirl, tap, and buff.” This means customers should use a brush to swirl product around on each lid’s liner to break down the minerals, tap the excess product off of the brush, and buff the product onto the skin.) “The liner is a special material that’s not very absorbent so that the colors don’t absorb into the paper,” adds Godin.
“What I love about both of these items is their functionality,” says panelist Peter Hargraves, section head for Procter & Gamble global packaging and device development, cosmetics.