2008 Editors’ Choice Award Winner: Personal Care
Play&Rewind, Re:Set, Icy Quick Lift
by Icy Beauty
One of the coolest packages on the market is Icy Beauty’s self-cooling monodose. This package was designed to dispense the brand’s Play&Rewind, Re:Set, and Icy Quick Lift anti-aging skin creams.
According to company cofounder and CEO Fadi Khairallah, quickly cooling the skin cream causes the product’s lipids to shrink, allowing them to penetrate the skin more deeply. Once within the skin, the lipids warm up and expand, filling out wrinkles.
Before branching out into the skin care market with Icy Beauty, Khairallah, a civil engineer, first developed the patented package with his engineering firm Thermagen. The self-cooling technology can also be used for items such as beverages, ice cream, and garments. During development, Khairallah partnered with engineers from the European Space Agency’s Technology Transfer Program to apply a simulation technique used for rocket engines to his technology.
The cooling process is not chemical, but rather, physical. It is based on water evaporation. When users press the package’s base, the water evaporation process begins, lowering the temperature of the inside of the package and the cream from 72° to 36°F in less than two minutes.
“Water evaporation is an effective way of cooling something down,” says Khairallah. “You can feel it for yourself when you sweat. When the body heats up, you sweat, and the sweat evaporates, removing the heat. When you make this happen under a vacuum, the evaporation process is very effective and very fast.” A ceramic chamber within the package, kept separate from the skin cream chamber, absorbs the water vapor. As the package cools inside, the surface of the skin cream’s stainless-steel chamber cools down, cooling down the cream.
The package’s outer parts are made from PET. Users will feel the outside of the package get warm to the touch as the inside of the package becomes cool. Khairallah says that this is because heat from the inside of the package is transferred to the package’s outside. “In thermodynamics, you cannot make heat disappear,” he explains.
Icy Beauty manufactures and assembles the packaging in its facility located south of Paris. All of the plastic parts are produced by Plastics 2000. Filling is done by a subcontractor. The cartons are produced by Etna Pack. Khairallah credits his partner Pierre Jeuch, engineer Lionel Frantz, designer Frédérick Crozet, and marketer Sophie Strobel with helping to design and engineer the packaging.
CPC Packaging’s awards panelists loved this package. “It’s the kind of forward-thinking concept that people talk about but never end up doing,” says Alan Bodker, executive director of Origins package development.
Khairallah says that before founding Icy Beauty, he shopped the technology around to various beauty brands. However, “It was like telling them, ‘You’ve been traveling on bicycles, and tomorrow you’re going to take a rocket,’” says Khairallah. “It was a bit too much for them to understand—what they could do with it and how they could market it.” Khairallah understood, and his brand can now claim that its packaging is truly one of a kind.