Glitter Balm Packaging

Why we moved away from biodegradable kraft tubes.

The idea for a Glitter Balm, first came to our founder M as an alternative to our really easy to use and ready to Rave Bags. We had been looking to discontinue them because we had discovered that our "biodegradable plastic" ziplock bags were not as they claimed. Plus leaving the glitter in aloe gel meant the glitter started to curl and over time colour would bleed out into the gel. Not to mention over a long period of time the gel would dry up. The Rave Bags worked find when micro-batched and purchased for instant use. But overall they had a short shelf life and was in the end just felt wasteful - not idea at all.

Using oil would solve two important things - the curling of the glitter, and the bleeding of the colour.

Inspiration took hold when she found a bees wax lip balm kit💡 in a Barwon Heads lifestyle store. Back home she played around adding glitter and it worked brilliantly. However, the lip balm kit had a plastic wind tube and these are not reusable and often not recyclable. 

This is where the idea for cardboard came. Again in Barwon Heads she found a solid perfume in a kraft tube and then noticed lip balms also in kraft cardboard tubes.

Initially they worked great. But we'd launched in spring 2018 but had not anticipated moody weather (just like us, natural things are influenced by the weather). The first batch balm was too soft and would not push back down, the second batch balm was made too hard and would not melt enough with the warmth of the skin to make application easy. 

And then M saw a beautiful customer with Glitterazzi balms at a festival. She was loving them and putting them on everyone. Everyone she dressed in the balm was loving them too, raving about the smell and how wonderful they felt on the skin. But M could see how the kraft tubes had started breaking, that the oil had leaked into the tubes... they just looked ratty. She was horrified.

We pulled the balms in kraft tubes off the site. And looked for alternative solutions. We introduced slide tins at first, but as the slide tin doesn't seal you need a hard balm solution, which is not bad, it's just harder to use and these tins were quite large which meant you had more product than you'd ever be able to get through. 

And that's how we ended up with mini screw tins filled with 5 gms of glitter or shimmer balm for a very reasonable $13 RRR. Five grams might not should like much but I've not been able to use one up yet! 

We love the packaging, easy to use, easy to send, hygienic and if the balm gets a little too hot it will be fine and if it gets a little too cold it's still easy to use. Yay ✨

Available in 12 different glitter balm mixes, including 2 in our iridescent biodegradable glitter rang.