Colour Measurement for Liquid Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products
Measure colour and haze of shampoos, soaps, perfumes & more
Colour Measurement for Liquid Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products
Measurement Solutions for Colour Specification, Production, and Quality Control of Liquid Pharmaceutical Products
Liquids are extremely common in the pharmaceutical and personal care industry, either as raw material, ingredient, process step, or completed product. Liquids can vary in colour by composition, strength, depth, and can also be affected by haze and settlement. The importance of controlling for these differences will depend on your process.
For pharmaceutical preparations, this may be done with a view to producing a product colour that is more palatable, or to ensure that batch to batch colour is consistent so that the consumer doesn’t perceive one as diluted, or different to their "usual" medicine.
For personal care products, the producer faces similar challenges, keeping their existing products attractive, aspirational, and consistent to build trust in the band. Some personal care products also need to consider the interaction with packaging colour to maximise shelf appeal.
Konica Minolta can help organisations to implement accurate and traceable colour measurement solutions for pharmaceutical or personal care products including perfumes, essences, oils, liquid medicines, lotions, suspensions, and preparations. Whether in development, goods in, production, or QC, our measuring instruments and software will help organisations to implement data driven process control and quality control procedures that improve consistency, saving time, and waste.
Digital colour data can greatly expedite your supply process and improve communication with suppliers on a local or global basis. By agreeing a colour and tolerances, standardising on instrumentation and methodology, disputes on colour can be greatly reduced and based solely on data rather than subjective visual perception. It also allows brands to scale or transfer production, by specifying, storing, sharing, and approving colour in a modern colour data software solution.
By measuring colour data throughout the process, the producers can improve their ability to predict and most effectively control the final outcome.
Our experts can help your teams to establish digital colour standards and colour difference tolerances that you can share with your supply chain partners. You can leverage the experience of our application teams to quickly establish repeatable, best-practice processes for colour and appearance measurement and control.
Konica Minolta benchtop spectrophotometers are widely used in the Pharmaceutical and Personal Care industries. The benchtop spectrophotometer CM-5 delivers a user experience that is both simple yet accurate, featuring a built-in display and user wizard. It benefits from a large open sided transmittance chamber and top facing reflectance measurement port. Either operating as a standalone instrument or connected to software, the device can be configured to simplify processes and data with simple pass/fail tolerances or to deliver more detail for deeper analysis or colour matching. The instrument firmware contains commonly used industry colour indices such as Gardner, Hazen/APHA, Iodine, European and US Pharmacopoeia, and is available with IQOQ installation in many territories.
Benefits
- Attract attention in retail (or "fit in" with established products)
- Deliver an improved user experience
- Control the colour which plays an important role in the placebo effect for medicines
- Meet expectations (minimise colour difference if customers expect white)
Instruments
CM-5 Benchtop Spectrophotometer
Benchtop spectrophotometer with built-in display, user friendly interface, and measurement wizard to cut operator errors. Can also be used connected to a PC for more versatile and detailed reporting. The CM-5 is also available with IQOQ installation dependent on local provision.
Applications
Measurement of Medicines
The colour of liquid medicines can be measured throughout production and for final colour QC using the CM-5 benchtop spectrophotometer. When transparent or translucent, the transmittance measurement chamber is used with either 2mm, 10mm, or 20mm cuvettes, or the flow cell accessory. Opaque liquids can be measured in reflectance using the top measurement port and petri dish accessory kit.
The firmware of the device can measure US pharmacopeia and a number of other indices in standalone mode, as well as many more user generated indices when connected to software.
Measurement of Perfumes
Perfumes and similar products can be measured using the transmittance chamber of the CM-5 benchtop spectrophotometer which can provide colour data for development teams, goods in, manufacturing, or QC. Colour consistency for high perceived value products is an important metric. A measuring instrument from Konica Minolta can deliver statistical analysis of colour throughout process control andquality control applications.
Measurement of Soaps
Soaps and other liquid products with all levels of colour and haze can be measured using the built-in firmware of the CM-5 benchtop spectrophotometer. The versatile CM-5 can measure both translucent or opaque products including liquid, solid, and powdered components throughout the process.
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