How are perfume glass bottles made?

Glass not only provides modern-day practicality and high standards specifications in perfume production and product design, but the material also has a storied place in scent history. Before we dive into what makes a particular glass high quality and suitable for luxury perfumes, let us first revisit the history of where the glass perfume bottle originated. 

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The Original Beauty Influencers

The Egyptians could quite possibly be the first beauty influencers, having originated the winged eyeliner, waxing, wigs, and the scents that were used in equal measure for suitors and ceremonies. The earliest perfume bottles, dating back to 1000 BC, were thanks to effortlessly innovative Egyptians to house scents made of fragrant flowers, plants, and seeds. The glass itself was also an Egyptian development using beads brought from Mesopotamia to the country in 1450 BC,

Soon Persians and Arab chemists helped to scale the production of perfume using ornate glass vessels that eventually spread around the world. 

Photo: Imperiale Guerlain 

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Why Do Luxury Perfume Brands Use Glass?

Glass bottles used in the perfume industry have a storied past and a highly specialized future. In the perfume industry, the primary packaging can be just as doted over as the product itself. From best-selling Chanel Coco Mademoiselle’s sleek and timeless rectangular bottle to the collectors Imperiale Guerlain, complete with an ornate design including sixty-nine golden bees, glass has always been the base material of choice. 

Before the advent of glassblowing, Egyptian perfumers added alabaster, gems, and metals to accent core-formed glass. 

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Aesthetics

In the early 20th century, the perfume bottle itself became just as important as the product, revising classical bottle shapes into revolutionary sculptural designs. Selling perfumes became about image and presentation, and the rest is history. 

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Luxury Material

Glass, as one of the earliest materials used to signal wealth, is a timeless luxury material when it comes to packaging. Artisan bottles are collector's items, coveted for their strong yet delicate glass curves and design. Glass psychologically reads to consumers as purity, strength, excellence, and quality. 

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Moldable 

Glass is highly moldable with the ability to be sculpted into artistic shapes, whereas other materials don’t have this versatile capacity. For example, Lalique’s 2018 Limited Edition scent, Seduction, employed a three-dimensional snake that wraps around the bottle's stopper, only possible due to the highly amenable glass material. 

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Quality, Health, and Safety

Glass, quite simply, is a practical choice in product quality control. It is highly durable, sealable, and maintains the chemical properties of perfume at the highest level. Non-porous glass rarely reacts with its contents. As a result, it can preserve a scent while not compromising quality as it interacts with the surface of the glass, whereas other packaging materials can degrade and cause spoilage. 

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Sustainability

The ancient perfumers were earth activists before their time. Glass is one the most recyclable materials on earth with nearly endless reuse potential without loss of quality or purity along the way. Although its manufacturing can be carbon intensive, eco-friendly production processes are emerging to meet sustainability goals along the value chain. 

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Photo Source: Chanel 

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What To Look For In Luxury Perfume Glass Materials

Glass-making is an ancient process that retains the use of sand and heat to create perfume bottles with perfect clarity and durability. Glass molders employ a proprietary recipe that maintains custom ratios of bespoke materials such as sand, soda ash, limestone, and cullet (furnace ready scrap class).  The materials are mixed, heated to a temperature of up to 2800F, and then molded into a bespoke shape. 

However, when it comes to the mass production of commercial perfume brands, the path to high-quality glass is not always crystal clear. So let’s examine what to look for in high-quality glass perfume bottle packaging. 

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Purity 

The core ingredients (i.e., silicas, sands, dolomite) will determine the glass bottle's overall transparency and crisp appearance. Checking the technical specifications of the raw materials used in glass production is crucial in determining overall purity. Each glass recipe will come with a different blend of raw ingredients. A well-designed recipe will only use high-purity raw materials that guarantee the glass quality. 

Generally speaking, the lower the iron content in the silica sand, the brighter and purer the glass. However, according to Saint Gobain Glass, homogeneity is a more subjective property that requires examination of the glass by eye or under low magnification. This quality check by the human eye ensures that it is free of "stones," "seed" - a glassmakers' term for small bubbles - and cords that can create a wavy effect.

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Unbreakable Glass

One of the weak spots in using glass for luxury perfumes is, quite literally, its weak spots. Enter a new spray technology that yields unbreakable glass. The spray wraps the glass like a second skin, making it more resistant to breakage. 

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Double Walls and Heavy Bottoms 

The signature thick double walls and heavy bases of high-performing perfumes have become synonymous with luxury. However, the physical weight of a glass perfume bottle with a heavier weight can directly influence consumer perception of quality and esteem.

In addition, bottles with a larger base and greater height are not only more durable, but they also have a greater shelf presence and can differentiate a brand. 

This design specification also works well with sustainability initiatives where bottle reuse is encouraged in refill programs such as the ones Le Labo and Thierry Mugler offer. 

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In a market where the packaging matters as much as the product,  the quality of glass matters.  The appearance, use, and durability of the glass should match the quality of the perfume. 

Find the glass that suits your perfume needs at the planet’s largest primary packaging marketplace. 

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[Image above] Designing creative perfume bottles takes time and money. Virtual modeling may hold the key to unlocking the age-old conundrum of good, fast, and low-cost. Credit: Pixabay

Are perfumes all about the scent? Yes, and no. Not only does a perfume’s scent say something about the personality of the wearer, a perfume’s branding does as well.

Perfumers carefully craft their brand image, from advertising and marketing down to the aesthetics of the packaging and the bottle. This careful branding is one reason iconic fragrances such as Chanel No. 5 continue to dominate the market decades after their introduction—even though the scent stays the same, the presentation of the perfume remains chic and fresh.

The perfume bottle especially plays a large role in crafting a brand image, but designing new bottles presents a special challenge for manufacturers. Glass is the material traditionally (and conventionally) used for perfume bottles, as glass is transparent and preserves the properties of the fragrance stored inside. However, as perfumers prioritize form over function in order to offer the most creative aesthetic appeal, perfume bottles tend to have difficult shapes with complex glass thickness distributions and a low tolerance to container defects.

Given the importance of aesthetic, creative bottles in building and retaining a brand image, developing robust fabrication methods is necessary to minimize waste and associated costs. Consistent manufacturing starts with engineering the glass, the molds, and the processing parameters. Unfortunately, this manufacturing process currently relies upon empirical knowledge and trial-and-error development cycles, which are expensive and time consuming.

Virtual process modeling offers the potential to reduce both the cost and time of development needed for creating new perfume bottles while improving robustness to process variability by simulating mold equipment and process conditions on a computer.

However, if you are like me, you dread seeing the word “modeling”—modeling involves high-level math in order to incorporate a wide range of material properties and many engineering parameters such as temperature, pressure, and heat flow, plus more. Add to that the complexity of the blow and blow (B&B) molding technique used for manufacturing perfume bottles and the mathematical requirements only increase.

Fortunately, a recent article published in the International Journal of Applied Glass Science explains the development of a numerical model for manufacturing perfume bottles that can handle the mathematical complexity of B&B manufacturing. Though there is a lot of math, the researchers do an excellent job of relating the most important aspects of the equations and the model to the material properties and engineering parameters.

The researchers of this study—Adrià Biosca, Salvador Borrós, and Andrés-Amador García Granada (Chemical Institute of Sarriá), Vincenç Pedret Clemente (Ramon Clemente), and Matthew Hyre (University of Northwestern)—wanted to model the effects that molds used to shape bottles have on finished products, and then compare these predictions to commercially manufactured bottles.

The researchers specifically targeted the distribution of glass in two bottles with very different shapes. The researchers discussed material parameters such as viscosity and thermal conductivity and how they arrived at the values they used. They also discussed engineering parameters including cycle time, wall friction, stresses, and heat transfer between the glass and the mold along with the effects of varying modeling parameters.

In the end, the researchers showed rather good agreement between the model and the finished bottles. Thus, they foresee their manufacturing partner Ramon Clemente being able to improve quality while also reducing the time and expenses of iterative development cycles.

Interested in learning more about latest advancements in glass science? The June/July issue of the ACerS Bulletin, now available online, features articles discussing recent glass innovations!

The paper, published in the International Journal of Applied Glass Science, is “Numerical and experimental study of blow and blow for perfume bottles to predict glass thickness and blank mold influence” (DOI: 10.1111/ijag.13208).