The unsung heroes of the cosmetic industry

It comes as no surprise to many, but tubes are under-appreciated. They're as ubiquitous as bottles, tottles, and jars, though they often don't get the recognition they deserve. Tubes are almost an ideal packaging concept for a variety of products. They're light, require very little material which makes them fairly inexpensive, and they can be easily tailored on the line to produce different lengths or girths for various capacities.

Many of the improvements in tubes have remained, however, fairly invisible to consumers, and have a lot to do with an explosion of decoration techniques and material options never before seen in the medium.

One of the primary proponents of the tube as a nearly ideal packaging solution is Neopac, a Swiss firm centred on taking tubes into the future. Neopac offers companies some of the best tubes available on the market, and seek to dominate the space by constantly ushering in improvements to their concepts that are normally not found elsewhere, or at least not in the same place, including better materials and superlative decoration options.

Many of Neopac's tubes include their innovative material Polyfoil®, a thin layer of aluminium that provides a number of benefits to tube production. Discovered in the 1960s, Polyfoil creates a wafer-thin, invisible barrier that coats both sides of a plastic sheet, creating perfect packaging for highly sensitive products. Tubes that use Polyfoil protect products from light, diffusion, moisture, organic and chemical compounds, corrosion, and more. Through the simple addition of a new, impermeable layer, companies can offer tubes that protect products far more comprehensively than they ever have.

Also, Neopac's design department offers a number of new decoration offerings that make tubes a lot more attractive than the standard white ones to which we're all accustomed. New possibilities have opened up thanks to the company offering offset printing (which can cover the entire surface of the tube), lacquering (providing different sheens and tactile sensations), and full tube metallization (making tubes even more eye-catching in metallic hues or pearlescent shimmers).