The Designer’s Guide to Cosmetic Packaging: Which Paper Stock is Best?

Personalized packaging offers cosmetic brands a great opportunity to create aesthetically appealing, persuasive, and engaging power with the awesome customization features. Customizing cosmetic packaging boxes refers to an excellent opportunity to craft a distinctive cosmetic packaging with different functionality, outlook, and impressive impact on the prospects.

The best stock refers to paperboard or paper stock options such as kraft paper, SBS, or corrugated stocks. They are mostly used to produce cosmetic and lightweight products of different industries.

Move on to learn how to choose paperboard stock based on weight, printing finishes, and sustainability.

Understanding the Core Idea of Packaging

You have equal chances of losing your potential customers and winning loyal customers at the very first impression of your products and brand image. This is inevitably based on the outlook and appearance of your products and brand with the use of packaging, standard, ready to use, or low quality packaging, or creating the personalized packaging of your brand. 

SBS (Solid Bleached Sulfate) is one of the greatest choices to boost your brand image, high-end product presentation, and create your brand distinction on the display centers. Kraft paper is second to none in winning the eco-friendly beauty in the highly competitive market. 

Solid Bleached Sulfate (SBS) – The Luxury Standard

SBS is a premium, pure white paperboard made from bleached virgin wood pulp. It is an amazing choice to produce packaging for quality makeup, perfume boxes, and skincare products. This material offers a smooth surface for the flawless printing that can capture crisp CMYK colors and gradients impressively. 

Embossing, debossing, and hot foil stamping are of great significance to boost your products and brand engagement, and they are highly suitable on the SBS materials with thicknesses ranging from 16pt to 24pt for cosmetics.

Kraft Paperboard – The Eco-Friendly Champion 

Kraft paper is a popular eco-friendly choice with the natural brown color appearance, the unbleached kraft paperboard made from recycled paper can communicate your brand commitment of green friendliness. For the instantly grabbing attention of your prospects, you need to choose this material to showcase natural products of organic, vegan, and clean beauty brands.

Mesmerize your prospects and customers with 100% biodegradable, versatile, lightweight, and easily recyclable materials packaging. The rustic aesthetic produced the nature friendly material options by providing an authentic, earth-friendly tactile experience can maximize your brand presence. This nature friendly material can ideally fit with the minimalist design, using dark-colored inks for greater look.

Duplex and Corrugated – The Heavyweight Protectors 

Simply lightweight paperboard might not fit for every type of products and projects, it might need heavy-weight, durable, and strong packaging materials requirements. 

A duplex board with white back or gray back is a highly cost-effective packaging material with one single side with a smooth surface. And the corrugated flutes with E-flute or Micro-flute are a great choice for heavy items or subscription boxes for your brand.

Let’s explain them in a summarized form for a better understanding: 

Selection Framework: Match Your Brand

Rule of Thumb for Thickness and Weight

Avoid producing packaging that can degrade your product presentation with poor customization options. Do not let your packaging feel flimsy, as it instantly cheapens the product.

The Sweet Spot: For the optimal baseline for cosmetic boxes, like lipstick boxes, serums and creams, choose 18-point (pt) paperboard (around 300–350 GSM). It can handle retail shelf wear without skyrocketing storage and shipping costs for your brand. 

Heavy Components: For the heavy products, premium foundations or perfumes might require standard folding paperboard with a rigid construction for the enhanced security and safety of the premium products.

Avoid the "White Point" Trap

Natural white paper is an awesome choice for your balanced base for the exact color matching such as Pantone (PMS) matching system for your product packaging boxes. Avoid choosing poor paper quality that cannot reflect the required color and shade of the branding needs, and might lose the quality of your product packaging.

Quick Design Execution Tricks

Cost does matter in producing luxury and premium packaging for your high-end products. However, you can use standard SBS paperboard and choose soft-touch matte amination, and choose wrapping paper like velvet or specialty paper for a great aesthetic look of your product packaging.

Concluding Remarks 

Create a lasting impression of your products with diligently choosing the stand out packaging for your brand. You can do it by effectively creating a balance of your aesthetic goals with structural requirements. For the best convenience of your cosmetic box packaging, become a partner of a leading, ideally scalable, and reliable custom packaging solution provider in the USA.