Today, a quick picture from yesterday: putting labels on flacons of Noontide Petals, and polishing the flacons before doing so. I do not like every color equally. The yellow of Noontide Petals, however, is one of my favorites, together with the orange labels of Orange Star (orange being complementary to blue). The labels stick pretty well even without polishing beforehand, but we play it safe there. With their extra thick lamination, and with the labels bending over the shoulder of the flacon, I am always a bit worried that they don’t stick well enough.

Perfumes can be pretty aggressive, from a chemical point of view: Ethanol, and especially some rough other ingredients such as lavender oil can be hard on a label. Especially, when the labels, wet with perfume, are touched. As the label sits right there where your fingers land when spraying, we learned that lamination is key. I learned so 3 years ago. I got labels that were “sort of” laminated, but not strong enough. In daily, average use they’re ok. But on fairs and also in shops where you have everybody spritzing and trying, there the labels really got worn out after a while. Thus, I switched suppliers and technology. A little detail but…. I was always so unhappy seeing my bottles with the should labels being not shiny and looking cheap (the labels weren’t)….

These days, we get our labels from an online printing service, based in Germany. They using super trooper technology and basically, it does not matter really whether you take 10 or 1000 labels at a time. Technology really advanced there and digital printing with laser cutting out of the contours made it all possible. I am not sure it was that easily accessible 10 years ago. The same is true for printing on bottles: lower minimal order numbers, better quality.

And the same is true for perfume creation and production. Prices for a perfume created by a perfumer in Grasse or somewhere else went down. Like: Get a star perfumer (or his lab staff) for … well: Not much.

No wonder everybody seems to get their own perfume brand these days.