Getting Personal with Plastic: Bottle Color Effects
and Innovations are Driving Colorful Market Expansion

By James Krouse

The personal care market is at the crossroads of several key trends. While established brands struggle to stay relevant against store brands, the entire market is placing greater emphasis on environmental concerns and overall cost reduction.

The plastics industry is responding with new technologies and resources for brand owners and designers. Some provide more effective imitation of other materials such as glass and metal. Others give eye popping effects not achievable with any other material. Still others combine these properties with new materials that reduce overall impact on the environment.

But suppliers of plastics and plastics technology are also providing an array of services to brand owners and designers to help navigate these choices and challenges. Tapping into these resources can open up the full possibilities of the medium, reduce development and production costs, and result in a more impactful design.

The ColorMorph concentrates from Teknor can yield dramatically shifting colors—across the spectrum—as beauty product containers are viewed from different angles.

Even better than the real thing

Glass still spells premium in personal care and cosmetics, but plastics are continuing to close in on this market with technology replicating the premium properties of glass while retaining plastic advantages such as reduced shipping weights and durability.

For example, a new masterbatch from Ampacet Corporation called Blue Edge gives clear PET bottles a blue halo around their periphery, enhancing bottle brightness. This creates bottles with a glass-like appearance and also gives bottles a soft glow in ultraviolet light, opening up some very nice cool possibilities for retail environments. "Since its impact is not based on a pigment, it does not hinder light transmission, and product visibility remains unchanged," says Doug Brownfield, strategic business manager at Ampacet.

These L'Anza packages were developed by Clariant with current whimsical cultural color trends in mind.

For clear glass replacement, other companies are broadening choices in clear plastic beyond PET. Milliken Chemical, for example, offers a clarifying agent called Millad 3988i that makes polypropylene a clear and effective alternative to PET for bottles. The company claims that clear polypropylene is a less-expensive solution than PET, due to a combination of raw material cost and lower density. Other benefits are improved moisture barrier performance and higher hot-fill temperatures.

Glass, however, is not the only material that plastic is looking to replace. Metallic finishes are now available that give plastic bottles the sheen of metal. Since many personal care products have built brands based on metal packaging, a transition to metallic-looking plastic for a certain lines is a natural step. Other brands may simply want a metallic look to a package for attractive branding.

To meet this trend, Ampacet offers a LiquidMetal Colors line, which gives PET bottle the look of highly reflective metal. Ampacet recently added seven shades to this line, for a total of 13 colors.

Customizable combinations of color, texture, and size, like these elegant rounded-square bottles from Siloa's Bacchus line, offer seemingly endless design options in fast-to-market solutions.

Predicting personal care trends

Although achieving the clarity of glass or imitating properties of other materials is a benefit plastic brings to the table, a wide range of colors and color combinations is highly important to the personal care market. Many plastics suppliers offer health and beauty brand owners and designers not just color but color expertise.

Clariant Masterbatches approaches color systematically and publishes a tool called ColorForward produced annually by its international ColorWorks team. The color-directions tool is derived from cultural events and the gradual evolution of color. The team places these colors in broad cultural categories for the year in order to link trends and events with color.

For example, one category called "All Eyes on China" speaks to the continued evolution of China economically and socially. This evolution coupled with the upcoming summer games in China is expected to bring golds and purples to the color palette in 2008. "China is eager to move away from red as a representative color," says Carolyn Sedgwick, Clariant's ColorWorks business manager. "With the Olympics taking center stage, we'll see China present a new look using a lot of purples. That will certainly influence everything from clothing to packaging. "

Linda Carroll, color forecaster for Ampacet, has just developed the 2009 color forecasts: "We're seeing simple, cleaner colors in '09 with consumers desiring simplicity over muddy tones. Anodized effects—mattes and burnished finishes and burnished bronzes that are heavily influenced by trends out of Asia—are expected to be seen in a lot of design."

Some companies are also introducing new effects that allow a shift in color to add complexity to these color evolutions. The Teknor Color Company, for example, has introduced ColorMorph concentrates to achieve color-shift effects. The new technology yields far more distinct color shifts as viewing angles changes than are available with conventional "color-variable" concentrates. Shifts in color include gold to bright red and transparent to opaque.

Getting touchy feely with bottles

Material suppliers are also responding to the tactile needs of the market with plastics that are pleasant to touch as well as practical for consumers as they use the product. Siloa Inc. markets an Apollo line of cylindrical bottles that come in a range of opaque colors and translucent color tones; however, as Siloa president Mark Bellard points out, texture effects have a strong impact.

"We offer a soft-touch spray finish that gives a frosted appearance as well as a very tactile soft rubber-like feel, " says Bellard. "It's especially interesting on a fairly rigid bottle and quite stunning on colored bottles. People touching it for the first time can 't put it down."

A new silk screen printing technology developed by Silgan Plastics can print a textured grip area anywhere on a bottle, applying it either over existing inks or directly on the bottle itself. Products for high-moisture environments can use this technology to offer consumers the added value of secure handling while continuing to use their existing bottles.

Having a friend in the business

Plastics suppliers are, more than ever, working with designers and brand owners to tweak designs and even come up with package design themselves. Working with designers, plastics suppliers often find themselves suggesting design changes in order to reduce weight or shipping volume, improve processing and filling, or simply create greater impact with a design. Brand owners are relying on suppliers as a design resource and suppliers are responding in kind.

"We have a creative design center that helps us work with designs and brand owners, " says Todd Wright, new business development manager from Silgan. "We even have a virtual store to test designs against the competition in a realistic environment. " As mentioned earlier, forecasting color is another resource from many of the plastic suppliers, but suppliers are quick to point out that they are a resource—not an authority.

"We're not trying to be prescriptive or dictate the next 'hot' color," says Clariant's Sedgwick. "We're here to inspire discussion and exploration, helping people to adapt these ideas to their own world of color. " Selecting color for plastic bottles can be a complex process. The multiple layers of plastic interact with each other for unique effects that are sometimes challenging.

Sedgwick explains how Clariant addresses this aspect of bottle design: "Brand owners and designers will come to us with color requirements sometimes across entire brand lines, and we look at product color and different types of plastics and help them achieve colors consistently across the entire brand line. Knowing the complex interaction of the material is essential to achieving that goal. "

This "delustered" effect by Ampacet offers a frosted effect that can be varied from translucent to opaque and can be tinted to yield the soft blue and green tones of vintage glass.

Environmental factors in effect

Concern for the environment has impacted the personal care market in several key ways. Retailer mandates to reduce packaging, consumer preference, and even government regulations are driving this trend full speed ahead.

"It's one of the biggest trends today in the personal care market," says Stacy Sheridan, manager, marketing in personal care from Silgan. "This trend is manifesting itself in products marketed as natural or organic and also in sustainable packaging. In addition, the green movement is also affecting color choices; which, of course, are more natural in tone to fit the branding of natural and organic. "

Some plastics companies have taken a holistic approach to reducing impact on the environment. For example, Clariant offers a "360° Service" which helps brands reduce impact on the environment by including or increasing the use of biopolymers, biodegradable materials, recycled materials, and recyclable materials.

Using post-consumer material in bottles is not as simple as it sounds. Because PET bottles are constructed of three layers, the outer and inner are usually newer food grade material while the inner layer is post consumer recycled material. However, manufacturers can control the thickness of the walls of plastic so that the outer layers which are food grade make up only 30% of the bottles thickness whereas the remaining 70% is post consumer.

In general, there doesn't seem to be many limits in terms of cost and technology holding brands back from embracing environmental plastics technologies. Clariant's Sedgwick cites that the design process is the most limiting factor. "If we know early on that reducing environmental impact is a priority," Sedgwick explains, "we can produce something for about the same cost. It's only when we find out late in the process that we run into issues."

What's around the corner

Even though plastic dominates the personal care market, many make-up and perfume packages still rely on the premium appeal of glass—but this may change soon. "There are still some hurdles to overcome with PET and perfumes," says Stacy Sheridan from Silgan. "But I'm sure that in the next few years we'll start to see that market moving toward plastic too."

As these technologies emerge, applying them in real world package designs becomes the final challenge. Ultimately the creativity or design makes these technologies come to life and it is at this point that the true ingenuity in packaging really begins.

For example, co-extruded bi-colored HDPE bottles from Silgan (the vertically striped bottles shown here) are produced with technology that has been around for at least ten years. But the company saw the right trends in the marketplace to market the technology again in 2007. Innovation, it seems, remains incomplete in the lab no matter how cutting edge. Designs that draw from and respond to consumer trends ultimately make that technology viable.

James Krouse has served as a consultant and writer for the packaging and printing industry for the past 10 years, covering package design for food & beverage, pharmaceuticals, and a wide range of retail goods. He can be reached at jkrouse@peartreecommunications.com.