DuPont: L’Oréal Professionnel adopts DuPont™ Surlyn® for the caps of its new hair styling range

The coloured, translucent caps of L’Oréal’s ‘play ball anti-frizz fizz’ and ‘play ball wax smoothie’ hair styling products are moulded from DuPont™ Surlyn® (www.dupont.cm), selected for its high transparency and ability to form thick-walled parts with uneven thicknesses. The ‘play ball’ range from L’Oréal Professionnel comprises fun hair products which encourage users to get creative and get the most from their hair style.

It was with this theme in mind that designers created the packaging of the play ball range’s aerosol-based hair-care products: the ‘anti-frizz fizz’ and the ‘wax smoothie’. Each has a white, aluminium aerosol container, decorated in pastel shades of blue and purple respectively. A key feature of the packaging’s design is the ball-shaped, translucent cap, moulded in highly-transparent Surlyn®, which is coloured to match the container’s decoration using masterbatching.

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The thick-walled caps (with a diameter of 4.8 cm) are crystal-clear, without sink marks or voids, and are moulded with a recess for the head of aerosol dispenser. The edge of the recess is moulded with a protruding lip which is used to create a firm, snap-fit seal on the neck of the dispenser, thus securing the cap on the product when not in use. The inclusion of the recess in the cap’s design creates uneven wall thicknesses for the moulded part (varying from between 8 and approximately 3 millimetres) – a design constraint that Surlyn® was able to meet to the customer’s highest satisfaction.

Aside from its warm, pleasant tactile quality and appealing appearance, Surlyn® boasts additional consumer-friendly features, such as lightness and scratch resistance as well as resistance to many of the chemicals found in the hair-care product. Significant manufacturing advantages include the production of thick parts with a clear, glass-like quality in a single injection-moulding operation, and, because the material can be introduced to the moulding tool through the smallest of gates during production, the gate location is virtually invisible to the naked eye.

The ‘play ball anti-frizz fizz’ and ‘play ball wax smoothie’ hair styling products are exclusively available from L’Oréal Professionnel hairdressing salons (www.lorealprofessionnel.com).

DuPont de Nemours (Deutschland) GmbH, Neu-Isenburg, Germany

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