How to use packaging colors to communicate information
Have you thought about what information beauty brands are communicating with the colors of their packaging? You can use colors to establish an easy to recognize brand or to help consumers tell different product lines apart. Let's look at some examples.
Brand Color
One really easy way to choose color for your cosmetics packaging is to use one brand color. It can make your products easy to recognize but the downside is that your products can easily look all the same. A great way to counteract this that I think Then I Met You does really well is to have very different shapes and sizes for all your products, that makes it easy to tell them apart by the shape. It can get a bit annoying if people need to read the text on the product to have any idea which one is which.
Brand Color Palette
Another way to to have a consistent brand but making products stand out from each other more is to have a brand palette rather than one color. I think this works really well if you want to have more than one color on your products. You want the colors to all look good together Bubble's products look really fun and cute, the colors really pop! Though I think they missed an opportunity to communicate more information with their choice of colors. At least if the colors have meaning it's definitely not apparent.
Product Categories
Sustainable beauty brand Upcircle has yellow packaging for their face skincare and green packaging for their bodycare. This makes it easy for consumers to know which a product is for from a glance. It's still easy to recognize their products as being from the same brand even though they are using different colors for face and body products.
Demographic
Sunscreen brands often use colors to make it easy for consumers to tell their different lines apart so we some different examples some sunscreen brands do this. Supergoop's regular sunscreen line is mainly white and yellow. Their Sunny Screen line made for babies and kids is pastel blue and yellow. The blue and yellow really pop together which works great for a fun kids sunscreen.
Ingredient Type
Naked Sundays, an Australian sunscreen brand that launched earlier this year has different colors so you can easily tell apart their products with organic or mineral sunscreen filters.
Functional Type
We can see yet another approach from the German sunscreen brand V.Sun. They have three different colors for their sunscreens, pink for SPF 30, white for SPF 50 and blue for their fragrance free SPF 50. This way they use colors to both set apart their products by what SPF they have and if they are fragranced.
Ingredient Theme
The popular brand Glow Recipe uses real fruits as ingredients in their products and have different colors to show which fruit is featured in each product. The colors remind us of the fruits used, like yellow for Banana and green for Avocado. You can also expect a lovely scent of whichever fruit the product has.
Ingredient Theme And Function
Similar to Glow Recipe the brand Scientia uses colors based on fruit for some of their products. But it's not just one fruit it's more a set of ingredients for their different lines that also clearly address various issues. Some of their have fruits like the peach and green supreme lines, while pure clarity is a line with ingredients that help clear your skin.
Function
Skinfix has different colors for products that address specific skin concerns. Even the names are straight to the point; Resurface, Barrier and Correct among others. This makes it easy for consumers to know what products to pick. Say you messed up your skin barrier and need a new moisturizer, easy, just take the bright blue one. You can't miss it! Colors are not just pretty they can also be used to make things easier to understand for your customers.
Thank you for reading!
//Jennifer Carlsson
