Archives: Packaging

It’s not your everyday bag although, in many respects, it is indeed just an ordinary brown paper bag – but with foil on. I don’t recall having seen this combination before when munching my way through a multitude of sarnies and salads. I don’t think I’ve ever had cause previously to pause and acknowledge the foiling on my lunch bag. Perhaps I just don’t eat at the right places.

It is an odd pairing though. Foiling is still the marker for a hint of luxury or class, on everything from wedding invitations to chocolate boxes. People keep foiled stuff, almost as if the shiny bits really were valuable. So why put it on one of the most ephemeral of all paper products – the lunch bag? Typically this lasts no longer that the time it takes to scurry back to one’s desk and rip it open with the haste of a caveman slicing into a dead deer. The bag is instantly disposable, one step away from being food waste. It’s barely even paper.

And yet this one has foil. It is a product of the popular misschu Vietnamese tuckshops (yes, I was there for the lemongrass beef salad) and is promoting a new eatery with a focus on potatoes (that shiny blob is meant to be two potatoes, I think, not a golden turd). The bag is produced by Gispac (‘we are bags…’), an Australian bag maker.

It’s not just the movies that are going 3D; print too is becoming more 3D in appearance, at least in certain areas.

To the casual observer, those round shiny blue blobs on the outside of this toothpaste package look slightly raised (my photography perhaps doesn’t them justice but, believe me, they look like real blobs). However, as soon as you touch them, it is apparent that the surface of the box, rather than being slightly raised, is in fact perfectly flat. It’s an optical illusion, one which is created by use of a special foil applied to that part of the print. I don’t know how they do it – it must be something to do with how the light is reflected – but the effect is to make it look slightly 3D.

It’s a nice effect but rather surprising perhaps to find it being used on something as humble as a cardboard box for a tube of toothpaste. Somehow I’d have expected to see it on something that attracts a lot of eyeballs, like a movie poster or a magazine cover, but there it is anyway. A toothpaste package.

It’s worth noting too the amount of work that’s gone into this package – not just the 3D effect but the ultra-fine print and the foiling, all designed to make it shimmer and shine. Just to sell some toothpaste. Typically, this type of finish is associated with ersatz-luxury items such as chocolate or wine, products that are regarded as discretionary purchases, non-essential but nice.

Perhaps there’s a connection too between this type of ‘bling’ print and oral gratification – something that offers a sweet taste or clean teeth. Cigarette packets are another example (at least until the introduction of plain packaging).

Hair shampoo and other beauty products also get this special treatment, highlighting how important print is as a medium in relation to the body and our own sense of self-image.

Two for tea and tea for two, la-di-da and da-di-la. This little pack of tea bags appeared in our street a while back. I didn’t get one but there were heaps piled up outside the block of flats down the road so I took one of those – sorry if you missed out on your English Breakfast.

Tea is such a prosaic, everyday item and yet, here, Twinings is casting it as an up-market product, that little bit of exclusive pleasure wrapped in a red ribbon, a special gift for you. There’s quite a deal of print involved in this freebie too and they’ve gone to a lot of trouble with it.

There’s the box itself, printed full colour inside and out with a varnish. Open the flap and, inside, all the tea bags are lined up, printed really rather finely; even on the smallest bag, the text is still legible. The yellow background is not just a flat solid but has a very subtle gradation, barely perceptible.

Then there is the sachet containing the tea bag, printed on a flexible film. I like the little cartoon of instructions on the reverse side, the kettle pouring in the liquid gold and the gold vapours rising from the cup.

And then there is the tea bag tag, measuring no more than 3x2cm and yet the minute type of LONDON is still legible – it must be about 2 point size, at the limits of what is readable. Ultra-fine printing on a mass scale on a tag attached to a tea bag – who said tea was prosaic?

Brewed some Earl Grey for breakfast this morning and it was lovely.