Beauty’s beast: From brass cases to plastic packaging
Small-format packaging often doesn’t even make it to this step. “One of the first barriers is the glass,” says Alexis Hocken, a chemical engineering doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with professor Bradley D Olsen’s research group. “Small-format plastics, typically defined as two inches in at least two dimensions, fall out during the glasssorting step. The glass gets broken down into shards and slips through a screen. Smaller plastics also slip through and enter the glass stream, contaminating it.”
That’s one reason recyclers don’t want the tiny packs.
At MIT, Hocken is working on a sorting process — something she calls a cyclone sorter — that would keep even the smallest plastic packs inside the recycling chain. The cyclone sorter would use the difference in densities to let materials such as glass fall out of the bottom, in early-stage recycling, and lighter materials exit through a side outlet.
There is no easier way, because small-format plastics come in a lot of different shapes, Hocken says. The tiny tubes, containers, cases and sachets are made up of a range of different kinds of plastics, so they can’t all be treated the same way either. “We need a solution that supports as many shapes as possible, and all categories of plastic. The cyclone sorter seems to be able to do that,” she says.
A 2-ft-tall prototype has so far been testing plastic flakes and glass granules, and has achieved a separation efficiency rate of more than 90%, she adds. (While Hocken has not published on this yet, she did present the technology at the Packaging Recycling Summit held in November in Atlanta.)
In the next phase of testing, samples of packaging provided by consumer goods companies such as Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder and L’Oreal will be tested. The aim is to then deploy the sorter at MRFs within the US, for a start.
Meanwhile, here at home, the India Plastic Pact is encouraging businesses, particularly in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, to limit the use of tiny packs.
Amid the pandemic, hotel chains around the world moved away from the tiny bars of soap and bottles of shampoo to dispensers that were either automated or could be kept sanitised and refilled. This has helped.
Legislation is stepping in to assist as well. California and New York, for instance, are both rolling out bans on single-use plastic toiletries at hospitality establishments, prompting more hotel chains to take a fresh look at their toiletry supplies.
In the retail sector, refillable packs are emerging as alternatives. Beauty and skincare brands such as Asa, Conscious Chemist and Bare Necessities offer refillable units. Refills can be bought online and are designed to make the transfer to the original pack seamless.
It will be challenging to do away with small-format packs since these serve specific purposes: affordability, limited shelf life and sampling, Hocken says. “While we’re devising better recycling solutions, refillable could be an alternative.”
Even 100 years ago, the makeup kit resembled a small treasure chest. Where today a whole kit can fit into a wallet-sized pouch, cosmetics were then kept and carried around in wooden boxes, often covered in intricate floral motifs, and lined with velvet.
The boxes were designed to hold multiple tiers of powders, paints and brushes. As long-distance travel picked up among women, they followed in the tradition of the apothecary boxes and vanity boxes used for storage in the 19th century.
The focus at this time was mainly haircare and skincare, rather than the multishade approach to face makeup that takes centrestage today. And this was because, for centuries, the use of vivid colours on the face was frowned upon in the Western world, considered the mark of a prostitute.
When and how did the shrink begin? The trend can be traced to show business.
It was gas lighting that first made makeup necessary on stage, by the 1840s. In the relative glare of these new lights, faces were seen far more clearly than they had been on candle-lit stages, and so actors began to use grease paint to even out facial skin tones, hide flaws, accentuate features.
Then cinema was born, and there was a lot more detail visible on the big screen. Makeup artists began experimenting with combinations for film. A pioneer among these was a Polish-American named Max Factor (born Maksymilian Faktorowicz).
By the 1910s, Factor was taking the grease paints out of their tins and moving them into the more-sanitary and more-lightweight aluminium tubes. By 1920, he was selling his kits to the public, as Max Factor Society Makeup.
As the movie industry birthed the filmstar, the segment took off.
This is what first lent an aspirational quality to the Max Factor product line, says Los Angeles-based hair and makeup expert
Andersen (below). Cici
Women were also taking to the streets at this time, around the Western world, demanding the right to vote. These women began to paint their faces as a way of rebelling and reclaiming their bodies. The rise of Egyptomania helped. Howard Carter unearthed the boy-king Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, and women wanted the dramatic eyes and outlined lips of the suddenly ubiquitous Ancient Egyptian art.
Between the tubes, glass bottles, brushes, wigs, gums and powder puffs, the chests were still quite large and heavy. Then came World War 2, and all available metals and materials were redirected to the war effort. This is when the makeup box suddenly got lighter, Andersen says. “Some brands modified their lux packaging and went from metal back to cardboard.” Brands such as Lancome, Alexandra de Markoff and Revlon, founded in the early 1930s, were making the switch. By the 1950s, the cases themselves evolved into the suitcase-shaped models that would remain popular until the ’60s.
Then, in the ’60s, new light and cheap kinds of plastic would change everything. Cosmetics packaging moved away from the heavier but easily recyclable aluminium and cardboard, to this new but non-recyclable alternative.
“This was also a time when the perspective on makeup started to change. As it became cheaper, products that had once been viewed as collectibles began to be seen as more disposable,” says Andersen. “The packaging itself was now much harder to recycle, or was non-recyclable.”
Around the same time, as air travel shrunk the world, “travel-sized” cosmetics — tiny items meant essentially as samplers — began to be handed out as gifts with purchases.
The environmental impact of the many, small plastic bottles and palettes has been immense, Andersen says. Which doesn’t mean that smaller packaging is necessarily bad news. “A combination of sustainable, low-waste packaging and reasonable, waste-free quantities would be ideal,” she says.
Mini mascaras, for instance, are a great way to portion a product that quickly runs dry. Refillable, recyclable cosmetic cases by brands such as Axiology, Half Magic and RMS are a step forward. In a full-circle detail, this packaging is often made of recyclable glass and aluminium.