Color me impressed: Clariant’s satin tints for premium personal care packaging target Asian market
11 Jun 2020 --- Color specialist Clariant has combined three colors from its ColorForward 2021 trend palette with a satin brushed-glass special effect to appeal to consumers in the booming Asian personal care market. The resulting colors from the combination help PET packaging give the impression of luxury, previously only available via the use of brushed glass for high-end branded products. The effect is developed during the PET stretch blow-molding process.
A proprietary additive in concentrated masterbatch form is added to PET resin during the molding of the bottle preform. Then, as the preform is reheated, stretched and blown into the finished shape, the satin look emerges.
“By adding the satin look, we create an illusion of depth within the container walls, making the bottle appear more like glass. However, the effect is not only visual. It gives the bottle a softer surface feel. It makes it more pleasurable to hold in your hand and this further heightens the impression of luxury,” says Vick Cai, Designer at Clariant ColorWorks, Asia-Pacific.
The technology behind the satin effect is not a novelty. Clariant was one of the first companies to bring it to the market almost 15 years ago.
“What is new is the fact that we are using it in combination with ColorForward trend colors intentionally to target a very specific audience. In this project, we focused on colors for the Asian personal care market, but we could do the same thing for any category in any region. It’s the kind of thing we do every day at Clariant ColorWorks,” explains Cai.
While the satin effect can be used with any color – or no color at all – the team at Clariant ColorWorks design and technology centers in Italy and Singapore decided to focus on colors that are most likely to appeal to their target audience.
The color of innovation
Clariant’s experts settled on three colors when introducing the ColorForward 2021 range, which marks the 16th edition of the company’s annual color forecasting guide for the plastics industry.
These colors include:
The golden ticket is a translucent beige with subtle gold flecks that create a feeling of luxury and indulgence.
No WI-FI is a soft green that suggests healthy, natural products, which don’t contain preservatives and which are less likely to cause skin irritation.
Motus intelligentia is a warm pinkish coral. In Asian culture, warm colors like this are associated with youthfulness and the fight against aging.
“We did a lot of research into the Asian skin care market, especially in Japan and Korea, where many of the most popular brands come from,” Cai continues. “What we found is that there is a definite preference for soft, muted colors and those that are found in nature. So we chose a beige and a light green, and even the red we selected is a very natural shade.
Clariant is set on continuing its innovative streak with several moves across the food and beverage, personal care and health packaging markets. Clariant’s CESA-IR additive masterbatches, for example, launched last year, are able to make dark-colored plastics visible to the near-infrared sensors used in automated polymer sorting systems.
While many companies use black packaging to brand prestige products, it can pose problems to recycling systems and has led to calls for black to be phased out of the palette. Clariant’s masterbatches help to resolve this issue and allow for increased recycling rates in Europe and further afield. However, the company sold its plastics Masterbatches business to PolyOne, a plastics material and resin manufacturing company, for approximately US$1.6 billion this past December.
Last year, Clariant Healthcare Packaging launched a new selection of US Food and Drug Administration compliant flat desiccant options for medical and diagnostic devices, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical powders, and other ingredients that require an arid package environment, such as sports nutrition powders.
Edited by Kristiana Lalou
