Excellence for Her

The new packaging for Narciso Rodriguez is a product from Axilone, a subsidiary of Ileos, a leading supplier of packaging to the fragrance, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industry.

Usually I do not write about perfume packages as it is dominantly the design and not the technical or technological performance which create the innovation. I am not a designer and although I love beauty in all forms, it is very hard for me to find the lyrical and analytical words to describe a design. But this perfume packaging is different; it combines a beautiful design with some high tech innovations.
As a consequence this is a two-in-one post, in other words for the design I follow (translated) the description of my colleague-blogger, Rogerio Oliveira, an industrial designer in Curitiba/Brazil, who saw this packaging at the CosmoProf in Bologna, and reported about it on his blog “Um Dia, Uma Embalagem”. After his perfect description I add some words about some technical details. But first Rogerio Oliveira:

During my visit to the recent CosmoProf, the world’s most important international event in the beauty and cosmetics sector in Bologna, Italy, one of the packages that most caught my attention was the perfume “Essence for Her”, the brand of stylist Narciso Rodriguez. Some may even say that the packaging is not pretty, as the format is very organic and irregular, in contrast to the packages usually developed for the perfume market. But it is the irregularity of the form that has, in my opinion, its greatest qualities. Furthermore, these organic forms are the trademark of designer Ross Lovegrove, responsible for this packaging design. I do not know if it was intentional, but we can say that this package is an "amalgamated" version of the male packaging, with its absence of straight lines, contrasting with the almost mathematical and architectural precision of the version for men. The bottle, produced in glass by Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres SA in France, is completely organic and crystalline, showing a typical feminine elegance, purity of soul and sensuality as imagined by the designer. What really impresses in this package is the finishing inside the bottle, a mixture of metalising and paint, giving the bottle a surprisingly nice appearance. According to Saint-Gobain, unlike the male version that holds an inside bag that prevents the product to come in contact with the painting, the bottle of “Essence for Her” does not need this trick because they achieved to create a finish, which is fully compatible with the product. The visual effect caused by metalising the inside of the bottle, together with the metal cache and the bottle cap, is impressive, leaving it hard to not be noticed in the gondolas of the shops. Rogerio is very short about the bottle cap, so let me do that.
Is the bottle made of glass, the bottle cap is moulded using Surlyn PC 2000 creating a harmoniously entity with the bottle.

Surlyn is a commercial thermoplastic ionomer resin that was introduced by DuPont in the early 1960’s. Surlyn can be used in conventional extrusion/co-extrusion, blown film, cast film, and extrusion coating equipment designed for polyethylene resins.
Moulded goods made with Surlyn are virtually unbreakable, and offer unusual design freedom, combining toughness, clarity and chemical resistance. It is one of the materials most favoured by designers, for complicated and bold designs.

Thanks to a direct removal of this fully massive, isomorphic, and smooth piece from the mould, no mould parting line is visible, leaving the transparency of the cap perfect.

Credit: The large photo is made by Rogerio Oliveira.

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Bag-in-Bottle

Gaplast GmbH replaces a four-part production process with the one-piece AirLEssMotion Bag-in-Bottle System. The new co-extruded, blow moulded bottle consists of a rigid PP outer bottle and a flexible DuPont Surlyn inner bottle.

When an unnamed customer of Gaplast GmbH recently built a new factory, the company also decided to install a more efficient production process for its spray bottles with disinfectant. The existing 1 ltr bottles used for disinfecting laboratories and operating rooms required a four-step manufacturing process and a manual assembly. The bottles were HPDE extrusion blow moulded. A separate foil bag had to be fumbled into the bottles manually to guarantee the airless dispensing function, which is needed to ensure that germs or micro-organisms are not dispensed together with the disinfectant liquid. A connector and a gasket, manufactured by injection moulding, respectively, had to be welded to the foil bag to provide a sealing for the gasket.

Gaplast GmbH replaced the existing four parts from the old packinging by the one-piece AirLEssMotion Bag-in-Bottle System. The new co-extruded, blow moulded bottle consists of a rigid outside PP bottle and a flexible DuPont Surlyn inner bag. The old flexible inner bag was made from a polymer alloy of two different polymers. As the polymer alloy would stick to the PP wall of the outer bottle, a separation layer would have been necessary in the new bottle. Gaplast GmbH replaced the polymer alloy with a DuPont Surlyn bag.
However, when the dispenser was activated, the vacuum created by the dispensing pump turned out to be not enough to separate the Surlyn inner bag from the PP wall of the outer bottle. In order to solve this problem Gaplast GmbH made two ventilation holes in the outer bottle without punching the inner bag. These two holes ensure the inner bag to collaps once the dispenser is activated. Delamination of the inner bag from the wall of the outer bottle guarantees a constant dosage of the trigger pump. The airless technology and the gamma sterilization after filling eliminate the need of preservatives.

In addition to savings on raw materials, the new packaging also simplifies an efficient waste control, when removed, as bottle and bag belong the same polymer family.
The bag-in-bottle packaging received the prestigious 2008 Dupont Award.

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