A cool, weighty glass container exudes luxury, which is why some of the world’s most prestigious brands choose glass to package their luxury fragrances, personal care and treatment products.

“The derived demand for glass packaging is stable with slight growth rates,” commented Burkhard Lingenberg, director of corporate public relations and marketing, Gerresheimer Group, Dusseldorf, Germany. “In the prestige fragrance sector in particular, glass packaging is an integral component of the brand and product identity. It can add value to the product and is successfully used to differentiate the product. The aesthetic appeal, the variability and individuality of design, the special refinement, smoothness and brightness of the surface—glass is the ideal packaging for dreams of beauty and allure.”

“Industry executives are all finally understanding that the quality of the design and of the glass and the uniqueness of the bottle is what it’s all about at point of purchase,” said Marc Rosen, president and chief executive, Marc Rosen Associates, New York. “Today people are willing to spend more money on the glass bottle at all levels of distribution.”

Many marketers are still finding new uses for heavy-walled plastic, but most of it is currently used for personal care and skin care treatment products. Plastic’s ability to maintain clarity and avoid breakage combines with its cost advantage to make it attractive, especially for products used in the bath, where wet, slippery, hard surfaces are common.

“PET and others allowed the plastic bottle industry to create a more luxurious product,” said Catherine Descourtieux, director of marketing, Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres, Cedex, France. “But the glass product that you weigh in your hands still has a luxury element that plastics do not have. The neutrality of the glass, which has no compatibility problems is also to be considered.” Many plastics do have compatibility issues with fragrances and other beauty ingredients.

Despite the prevalent use of plastic packaging for personal care treatments, some high-end treatments continue to choose heavy-walled glass jars and bottles for the sheer luxury they convey to the consumer. Such is the case for Guerlain’s latest skin care range Issima Success Model, which is packaged in proprietary deep cerulean blue glass containers. There are three products in the line: Day Care and Night Care, which are housed in slender, curved jars reminiscent of antique bowls, and Lifting Serum which is concentrated into an elegant pump bottle that has a small pedestal at its base.

Guerlain’s Issima Success Model line is elegantly presented in glass bottles and jars for a luxury look and feel.

Glass: The Choice for Fine Fragrance
The perfumery and cosmetics market is perennially linked to haute couture fashion brands and an exclusive fashion brand inevitably needs an attractive glass-packaged fragrance. “The glass packaging is a strategic marketing instrument which makes a significant contribution to the brand image,” said Lingenberg. “It appeals to the consumers’ senses and creates a perfect harmony between the design and the contents.”

Rosen holds firm to the belief that consumers equate heavy glass with quality, which is why his FiFi award winning fragrance, Shanghai, is encased in a bottle that’s two precise, contrasting cavities that are exactly half clear glass and half colored juice.

With a design résumé spanning decades, Rosen created Shanghai as his first foray in developing fragrances after designing their bottles for years. The experience afforded him the unique opportunity to witness firsthand how heavy glass packaging impacts consumers. “Consumers appreciate the weight of the bottle,” he said. “It connotes quality, prestige and elegance. All of the things they want to feel about themselves, the weight and design of that bottle conveys.”

Emanuelle Mazzei, president, Brosse USA, New York, contended that the Shanghai bottle’s simplicity belies the difficulty of its execution. “In a spherical-shaped glass bottle the glass will tend to sink to the bottom and to the sides. Marc wanted to make a distinct separation between the glass thickness and the cavity,” he said. “It took a lot of craftsmanship to achieve that level of precision to keep the cavity distinct and neatly separated from the glass mass at the base of the bottle. That shape also requires expertise to control rippling and deformation on the exterior surface.”

Heavy glass bottles with distinctive inside-the-bottle-distribution of glass are very much in demand, asserted Doug Thompson, chief commercial officer, Heinz Glas USA Inc., Linden, NJ. He added that high-end fragrance bottles continue to push the limits of design and manufacturing capabilities. “But we are flexible in developing new technologies,” he said, “like our puck system to produce glass bottles with a little or no fixed base, to manufacture these cutting edge shapes.”

Glass Plays Well with Other Materials
Other times, a glass package is best showcased when it’s melded with other packaging mediums. Paco Rabbane Ultraviolet Man innovatively combines the heft of glass with cool, brushed metal and silicone. According to the company, the bottle, by Brosse, is comprised of “Delicate materials, rectilinear geometry as thin as possible along the various planes…these features add up to a design never before been achieved on an industrial scale. The packaging expresses the feeling of a visionary and designer fragrance. Across the background comes a ray of ultraviolet light and the meeting of black and metallic violet gives the product an immediate sense of luxury.”

There has also been more interest in limited edition bottles, which are signed and numbered, according to Robert DuGrenier, of Robert DuGrenier Associates Inc., Townshend, VT. DuGrenier’s studio was recently commissioned to craft a limited edition bottle for Donna Karan that was hand decorated with 24 karat gold and enamel.

The FiFi-award winning design of Shanghai by Marc Rosen is a precise orb, half solid, clear glass, half rich, red juice.

Glass Making as Art
For the most part, the production of glass packaging has remained largely unchanged for decades. All of the major glass houses utilize Individual Section (IS) machinery, but Brosse’s Mazzei contended that the machine is only as good as the artisan operating it. “The true artistry of prestige glass making comes from the expert manning the machine,” he says. “A standard IS machine will reliably put out consistent, industrial-level, high-end perfume glass, but glass experts behind the machinery have the know-how to be innovative and achieve unique shapes, glass weights and forms.

“For the FiFi winning bottle for Gucci Homme, the machine took second fiddle to the glass maker on the machine,” he continued. “Another example is the heavyweight Dunhill bottle with the offset neck and raised panel. These are bottles that are technologically challenging due to the characteristics of the design and weight.”

The simple organic shape of Bulgari’s Aqua Pour Homme belies the difficulty of its execution. Courtesy: Bulgari

The Shape’s the Thing
Bulgari’s latest fragrance, Aqua Pour Homme is described as being “fresh and awash with riches from the sea,” and the organically shaped bottle is evocative of a smooth, polished stone realized in blue glass. According to Bulgari, “The pure spherical contours of the bottle containing Aqua Pour Homme capture the light and reflect the physical characteristics of life-giving water. Totally ergonomic it is pleasingly tactile, seductive and redolent of the smooth stones and corals washed and shaped by the sea.”

The bottle was manufactured by Brosse in 50ml and 100ml versions. Mazzei said the free form shape was an exercise in maintaining cavity wall consistency and uniformity along the perimeter of the wall of the bottle. Just as complex was L’Instant Homme by Guerlain, which is presented in a masculine, thick-walled rectangular bottle.

The bottle for Victoria’s Secret Beauty’s So In Love artfully showcases the blush colored juice it contains.

Sometimes a glass bottle is best showcased in a pure unique state, without unnecessary decoration. Victoria’s Secret’s latest scent, So In Love, is housed in a pedestal bottomed, V-shaped flacon. Conceived by design firm, Lloyd & Co., the ultra-modern, beveled bottle is likened to “an exquisite piece of jewelry accented only by the blush colored juice housed within.”

Brosse’s Mazzei admitted the bottle was deceivingly complex. “We produced the 15ml, 30ml and 75ml eau de toilette (bottles) and there’s a lot of glass weight,” he said. “The v-shaped bottle has many tricky complex panels.”

“Attractive new shapes often combined with very small crimple necks and sparkling finishes, enhance the purchase attraction,” concurred Lingenberg. “Generally speaking the glass packaging now often appears in striking but rather unostentatious shapes where in former times more glamorous shapes characterized the market.”

Decoration Adds Personalty
While bottle shape plays a pivotal role in brand recognition, great headway has been made with regard to decorative embellishment techniques. “It used to be you could either frost the bottle or leave it clear,” said Rosen. “Now bottles can be screened from the bottom or sides to add color to glass.”

The bottle for Bond’s No. 9 Chinatown makes use of a heavy walled bottle and cap with artwork inspired by the famed New York neighborhood.

New York-based Bond No. 9 has only been in business for two years, but in that short amount of time, the company, lead by Laurice Rahmet, president and founder, has developed a range of 24 fine fragrances dedicated to capturing the nuances of New York neighborhoods such as Little Italy and Wall Street.

The thick glass bottle, manufactured by Bormioli Luigi USA, Horsham, PA, is the unifying feature of the line. “The heavy glass bottle shape (star-like) is representative of New York and we decorate according to the neighborhood the fragrance represents,” Rahmet said. “It’s important we had a big, thick glass bottle that feels weighty in your hand so it feels substantial, not cheap. We did a glass cap too, something that’s been abandoned in the modern industry. A heavy glass bottle with a light plastic cap is too dramatic of a contrast.”

Each fragrance in the range is differentiated by unique artwork inspired by the neighborhood the fragrance represents. The bottle for Bond No. 9’s most recent launch, Chinatown, features two panels of Chinese art. “When you really know the spirit of the neighborhoods it’s easy to envision Little Italy in orange and Wall Street in black,” commented Rahmet.

Proprietary bottle decorations are applied on top of the glass by USS Corp., Newark, NJ. “Through our spray and decoration techniques we were able to give the appearance of parchment on the glass container. Each item was sprayed and silk-screened and not a paper or acetate label,” said USS Corp.’s Robert DeProspo, executive vice president of sales and marketing.

Technically there are almost no restrictions on design ideas and there is indeed an increasing trend for perfume manufacturers to exploit the possibilities of individual glass finishing, says Gerresheimer’s Lingenberg. “Innovative and glamorous effects are frequently achieved by means of extremely refined finishing, for example with partly etched or finely textured surfaces,” he said. “It is also striking how often strong color signals play a role—for example through tinted fragrances, which look particularly effective under brilliant glass, through iridescent feeder coloring of the glass itself or through print effects or decorations like lacquering which requires a very high quality of the glass surface.”

Pure Poison by Dior has an iridescence created with a three-step process by Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres, which manufactured the bottle.

As an example, Lingenberg cites Christian Dior’s Pure Poison which was launched last September. The bottle, manufactured by Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres, “shows a 3-step-decoration with an ‘inside type of lacquering’ which is very demanding and unique,” he said, adding that Interparfums “classic Burberry bottle (also made by SGD) displays a four-step-decoration. Heavy glass bottles with sophisticated decorations make copying (which is typical for the mass market) more difficult.”

Colored glass is growing trendier; however organic sprays have proven to be a popular decorating alternative, especially for lower volume runs. “Sprays also deliver a wider range of colors in terms of reds, pinks and other bright colors,” said Bill Reed, director of cosmetic sales, The Glass Group, a major supplier to L’Oreal, Estée Lauder and Revlon.

Reed said organic sprays are one of the top modes of decoration for established product lines in search of an affordable upgrade. “Some of the more mature lines are being purchased by other companies and updated,” he noted. “The Glass Group developed the signature donut shaped bottle for Bijan more than a decade ago. Now the company is updating the bottles with organic sprays in reds and blacks, evidenced most recently in Bijan Wicked for Men.”

He cited other examples like Pierre Cardin and Perry Ellis 360. “Brut was originally developed in glass and was converted to plastic,” he said acknowledging that The Glass Group was recently tapped to develop a new mold that would once again bring Brut back into the realm of glass.

“There’s definitely a trend toward bringing things back into glass. It’s a more upscale image with glass, even for mass fragrances,” he said.

Injecting a Dose of Prestige into Mass Glass Packaging Nivea presents its “masstige” product Creme-Ölbad in a glass teardrop made by Gerresheimer. When well executed, glass packaging is the embodiment of luxury— a sentiment that’s transcended the prestige segment into the mass segment, causing the industry to create the term “masstige.” “Even in mass and home shopping, people realize how important the bottle is and are willing to take money away from other areas to spend it on the glass,” said Rosen. “Companies and marketers realize that the bottle is the image of the brand. Consumers want design and they’re willing to pay for it, but they want quality.” Mass bottles, even stock mass bottles, have raised the bar on quality. “We used to think someone buying at a mass level would be willing to buy a bottle that was ‘nice’— there was a clear delineation between prestige glass and mass,” said Rosen. “In the last five years, mass bottles have gotten heavier, the design is better and the edges are sharper. They’re really borrowing from prestige.” Mass retail stores have become more convenient for working women running quick errands and family outings. Rosen says that customers essentially demanded that mass products be in some way comparable to the department store brands and the packaging is a reflection of the marketer’s response to that demand. “Coty bottles are heavy glass now, just look at the Celine Dion fragrance,” he said. “Mass brands have a very strict cost of goods, but now more than ever, they’re willing to make the investment.” “More mass fragrances which have a brand or celebrity name behind them are driving the market,” agreed DuGrenier. “This used to be done by the high-end fashion designers, who wanted a couture fragrance as their signature scent. The mass fragrances are branded differently and the need for the high end ‘couture fragrance’ is just not there.” “Mass market stores are in demand for better image in the beauty business,” agreed Bormioli Luigi’s Etchaubard. “High-end glass as a result is making inroads to these stores as a way to compete with luxury brands yet at a lower price point at retail.”

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