Lancôme required a packaging material that mirrored the uniqueness of the multi-performance properties of the skin cream and that complied with the design and safety specifications it stipulates for all its packaging.
Ludovic Gardet, application development manager of cosmetic and personal care packaging for Eastman, stated "Lancôme's specification were highly-demanding for this packaging which has been designed with the greatest of care in terms of style and aesthetics".
Eastman, which manufactures chemicals, plastics and fibers, has designed the glass polymer to include gloss, colorless crystal transparency, chemical and ultrasonic weldability to comply with the brief provided by Lancôme.
Thierry Ramboz, skincare products packaging manager for Lancôme, explained the reason for the tight specification is because 'the packaging material is in direct contact with the cream product, it had to be chemically inert'.
Eastman used hot-runner technology in order to create a double walled container, with the inner shell being lacquered and inserted into a transparent counterpart with high wall thickness, creating an optical effect of the inner sphere seeming levitating inside the outer wall.
The company's design capabilities ensured the container was able to be made with two thick walls, in order to give it the feeling of being heavy in the hand, whilst also maintaining complete transparency in order to make the packaging aesthetically pleasing to the consumer.
'The design of the container called for a material with high-gloss, to be totally colorless like glass and with the possibility of very thick-walled moulding', Ramboz said.
Lancôme's Secret Vie face cream has been designed to target the growing 'anti-aging' trend amongst Women consumers, designed to act on six major types of skin cells, corneocytes, keratinocytes, melanocytes, langerhans cells, fibroblasts and nerve endings, in order to counteract lines and wrinkles.
Eastman has used glass polymers in the past, and earlier this year supplied Colt Packaging with them, when they teamed up to create a packaging concept for a sample anti-aging cream, created by Eastman.