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Case History: Keeping Track
Timestrip’s smart label, including a view of the label’s start button.
Packaging tells customers when lip gloss has expired.
by Jennifer Kwok, EditorLike food, lip gloss has an expiration date. Not all customers realize this fact. And some that do realize it simply choose to ignore what they already know—that, like all good beauty products, lip gloss doesn’t last forever. With this in mind, Cargo Cosmetics launched a new lip gloss package featuring Timestrip technology that helps customers keep track of the lip gloss’s expiration date.
Timestrip, patented by UK company Timestrip plc, is a smart label that monitors how long a product has been open or in use. As the Timestrip Web site explains, the label has a porous membrane through which a food-grade liquid diffuses in a consistent, time-controlled manner.
When the label’s start button is pressed, the liquid comes into first contact with the white porous membrane. Thereafter, the liquid slowly travels down the membrane strip, from one end of the Timestrip to the other, slowly dying areas of the strip as it passes through. How much time has passed is indicated by how much of the Timestrip has changed color. When the Timestrip is completely colored, the product has expired.
Hana Zalzal, founder of Cargo Cosmetics, says that she discovered Timestrip while doing Internet research. Zalzal, together with her packaging supplier, found a way to incorporate the Timestrip in the lip gloss bottle’s cap. “It occurred to me that the space in the cap was dead space,” she says. “We didn’t want to make the bottle bigger; we didn’t want to add bulk. So we decided that the cap was the best place to house the Timestrip.”
A clear window in the cap allows customers to read the Timestrip clearly. The Timestrip itself is inserted into a vertical slot on the top of the cap. To activate the Timestrip, consumers simply have to push the Timestrip down into the slot. When pushed into the slot, Timestrip’s start button presses against a tab protruding from the slot’s inner wall, activating the flow of liquid.
The tab on the cap had to be engineered precisely in order to provide the correct amount of pressure to activate the Timestrip’s start button. “Timestrip also had to make sure that its technology functioned with our cap,” says Zalzal. “The activation button can be made in various sensitivities, depending on how hard or softly the start button needs to be pressed.”
In the cosmetics industry, the Period After Opening (PAO) symbol exists on packaging, indicating how long a product is guaranteed to be efficacious after it is opened. However, this symbol is used much more prevalently in Europe than in the United States.
Zalzal says that on average, lip gloss only stays fresh 9 to 12 months after it is opened. Therefore, Cargo’s Timestrip indicates an expiration period of 9 months. “We put a 9-month PAO deadline on the package, but we understand that women tend to linger on a product even after the PAO has passed,” she says. “So we built a bit of a buffer into our deadline. After the strip changes color, customers still have time to use up the lip gloss. After 9 months, it doesn’t mean that something bad is going to happen. It just means that the freshness of your product can no longer be guaranteed.”