Direct Printed Perfume Bottles for an Egyptian World Cup Edition

During the World Cup, a client in Egypt came to Sun Studio with a brief that was simple to say and hard to make: a perfume bottle that could only be Egyptian. The fragrance was mango, and the packaging had to carry the same energy as the scent.

No label. The artwork had to become part of the bottle itself. Sun Studio printed 1,250 flat square bottles direct in Dubai.

Project facts

Client

A client in Egypt

Material

Flat square glass perfume bottles

Printing service

Perfume bottle printing

Application

Retail fragrance packaging

Quantity

1,250 bottles

Production

Direct UV printing, printed in Dubai

The requirement

A label is the easy answer and the wrong one here. A label sits on top of a bottle; it never belongs to it. This brief asked for artwork that reads as though it had been painted onto the glass.

What we did

The bottle was printed direct on both faces, so the artwork wraps the object rather than being applied to it. There is no label edge and nothing to lift.

The fill level and the colour of the liquid were treated as part of the image rather than something to hide, so the mango-coloured fragrance reads through the artwork instead of behind it.

Technical considerations

A flat square bottle gives two faces to fill and a liquid inside that had to stay part of the picture. Print it solid and you lose the fragrance entirely; leave too much clear and the colour goes weak. Balancing coverage against transparency is the whole job on a bottle like this.

The outcome

1,250 bottles in which the fragrance, the artwork and the packaging are one object instead of three — a standard flat square bottle turned into a canvas, from an idea in Egypt to a finished bottle printed in Dubai.