In recent years, packaging has been assigned increasingly diverse roles, far beyond merely containing and protecting the product. New market demands from both producers and consumers, greater awareness of environmental challenges, and social trends have propelled packaging to take on a key role.
Modern packaging is expected to do much more than simply store a product; it must preserve it for as long as possible with barrier materials that protect against light, oxygen, and humidity. Packaging has also become an essential medium for telling a brand’s story through captivating designs, interactive technologies, and QR codes. Sustainability plays an increasingly important role in the choices of both producers and consumers, who are increasingly drawn to eco-friendly alternatives. The shape of packaging has also evolved, aiming for user-friendliness with features like resealable openings, spout dispensers, single-use sizes, or family formats to meet diverse consumer needs.
In short, the packaging industry is constantly improving, with research and development working hard to meet the market's growing expectations.
At Packstyle, we know all about it! As a company, we strongly believe in the importance of research and innovation, which is why we continually invest time, resources, and expertise to develop new materials and test them to ensure our clients always have the perfect solution for preserving and presenting their products.
There are indeed some products that need more attention in packaging, for example coffee. Packstyle has been working for a long time to find packaging solutions that best preserve its delicate aroma and keep it intact over time, thanks to its close partnership with research bodies and specific institutes such as IEI, Istituto Espresso Italiano. (to see the results of the trials: After two scientific tests, Packstyle packaging preserves coffee optimally even under stressful conditions.).
Certain products require extra attention in their packaging—cosmetics being a prime example. Cosmetic products, with their delicate formulations sensitive to external factors like light, oxygen, and contamination, need appropriate packaging to preserve their integrity and effectiveness.
Specifically, cosmetic packaging must:
To meet these requirements, cosmetic packaging must be safe and highly functional. It must prevent interaction between the product and the packaging, avoid the migration of substances (and the other way around), and act as a protective barrier, keeping the cosmetic’s properties intact.
Flexible packaging is an ideal choice for cosmetic products due to its many advantages, making it versatile, robust, lightweight, and, most importantly, safe.
Packstyle pouches are made using high-quality materials suitable for food contact, meaning they do not release harmful substances into the product and act as a barrier, protecting the contents from external contaminants like dust, air, humidity, and microorganisms.
Cosmetics, generally being chemically inert mixtures with a neutral or slightly acidic pH, share similar physical and chemical properties with certain food products. This makes food-safe packaging materials particularly effective for cosmetics.
The safety of Packstyle pouches is further enhanced by the absence of harmful adhesives. The pouches are heat-sealed and printed with low-migration inks, ensuring maximum protection and safety for consumers.
At Packstyle, we don’t settle for theory alone—we want to see how our packaging performs in real-world scenarios. We have previously subjected our pouches to numerous tests: for example, we simulated the accelerated aging of a pack containing coffee by holding it at different storage temperatures, starting at 30°C up to 70°C, to discover that the blend inside retained its aroma intact. We always travelled packs of coffee over 18,000 km and compared the product inside with that stored in milder conditions and found no difference. We tested ourselves with the complex world of specialty coffee blends, sending a very delicate single origin around Europe and asking experienced specialty coffee tasters to evaluate the coffees inside. The result was that our pouches perfectly preserved the delicate aromas of this single-origin.
For environmental purposes, we relied on CSI, a European reference centre for material conformity testing and certification, and subjected our pouches to the recyclability cycle to verify that the materials they are made of are indeed convertible into secondary raw materials. (Read more: With CSI to test the recyclability of Packstyle pouches)
This time our curiosity led us to the cosmetics sector. In collaboration with Unired, a spin-off of the University of Padua that offers customised solutions for product innovation and the growth of know-how in Health & Personal Care companies, we wanted to monitor the behaviour of our packaging containing cosmetic formulations and possibly detect differences between materials.
In detail, the study focused on the stability of Packstyle pouches filled with oily cosmetic products with or without essential oils and/or perfumes, or diluted in water or water and glycol, in order to test their resistance.
The pouches tested were equipped with a dispensing spout, a convenient accessory that Packstyle provides for those who want to make their pouches more convenient and easier to use. In fact, the spout allows the contents to be dispensed in a controlled manner, avoiding waste or excessive spillage. It is ideal for liquid or semi-liquid products, such as creams, sauces, detergents or drinks. As highlighted several times in our blog articles, compared to rigid packaging, flexible packaging, even with a dispensing spout, uses less material, reducing the overall weight and environmental impact of production, transport and disposal.
The study conducted by Unired and coordinated by Marco Scatto, an industrial chemist specialising in polymer science, whom we have already met in previous Packstyle tests, subjected some of our materials to stability tests over time. The samples were subjected both to room temperature, and in an oven at 40°C, simulating a dry environment, and again in an oven at 50°C with relative humidity at 75% to monitor any changes over time.
Research has shown that Packstyle's metallised recyclable pouch is the optimal solution for packaging cosmetic products. This type of packaging proved particularly effective even in the presence of high concentrations of perfumes or extracts, which are often known to interact with packaging materials.
Tests have shown that the pouch allows the packaged product to remain stable over time and also has good structural strength from an aesthetic point of view. Both after one week and one month, there was no product leakage or visible alteration of the packaging material. The pouch therefore proved to provide optimal protection for the contents, preserving its integrity and quality.
These results confirm the reliability and safety of Packstyle's metallised recyclable pouch, an innovative choice that combines convenience, sustainability and high performance, fully meeting the needs of the cosmetics industry.
Supported by the multidisciplinary team of the Unired network, we at Packstyle are proud to offer our customers a product in which we deeply believe. Thanks to the commitment to study and research that guided its development, we can offer a solution that we fully trust. By testing the different products contained within Packstyle's flexible packaging, we confirm how versatile our pouches are and how well they are able to contain even intangible features such as fragrances and cosmetic product formulations.