 |  | There are two current major trends in health and beauty packaging design: HDPE bottles with special effects created from a two-component color system used in combination with a multilayer bottle structure, and PET bottles moving away from transparent tints to translucent frosts or pearlescents.
Clariant's Personal Care Packaging Color Design Center, located in McHenry, IL, is capable of assisting in design innovations, product development, special effects, color prototyping for bottles and closures, color trending, and color development project management. The Color Design Center provides a creative environment where designers, engineers, and brand managers can meet on site with Clariant's color design team to create color formulations for an entire product line with hours.
Color characteristics such as hue reflectance, refraction, luster, matte to gloss surface finishes, transparent to opaque levels of light transmission, and textures from soft-touch to micro-foam can each be evaluated on their own merit.
Clariant is a global resource for color innovation and through our association with design groups, is directly involved in the forecasting of current and future color trends.
Clariant manufactures masterbatch colorants that are compatible with the full range of plastic processing equipment. Typically the color formulations are process- and resin-specific to ensure superior performance. The major processes for health and beauty packaging colorants are injection molding, compression molding, extrusion, blow molding and sheet calendering.
Applications in the personal care, health and beauty, and cosmetic markets include, but are not limited to the following:
¨ Extrusion blow molded bottles in mono-layer or multilayer configurations
¨ Injection blowmolded bottles
¨ Mono and coextruded tubes
¨ Tootles
¨ One- and two-step PET bottles and jars
¨ Injection molded or compression molded closures including the following:
¨ Caps
¨ Lids
¨ Spouts
¨ Actuators
¨ Overcaps
Clariant has developed colorants for health and beauty applications in all thermoplastic resins with a primary focus on LDPE, HDPE, PP, PET, PVC, SAN and PC. Some special effect colorants may be limited to specific resin types, and visual results may be reduced with resins that have a moderate to high level of opacity. Depending on resin type, specific application and desired visual effect, let-down ratios (use rates) can range from 200:1 to 10:1 in pelletized masterbatch form.
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