Colour Tone Masterbatch

Colour is a powerful marketing tool. So it is no surprise that, used strategically, colour sells. Yet as consumers we are notoriously fickle about colour - green is considered to be unlucky for some, while hospitals use it everywhere because they say it has a calming effect on patients. Smart marketers use colour to create brand awareness and maint... ain edge in highly competitive and fast-moving consumer and industrial markets. Modern plastics come in a riot of colours, of every shade and hue imaginable. One of the best known authorities on colour is Pantone. Founded in 1963 by Lawrence Herbert in the US, the company provides a system that facilitates the selection of colour and the sharing of this information to reproduce any shade choice across a variety of industries. A special tool, the Pantone Plastics Color System, allows designers, manufacturers and suppliers to select, specify, control and manufacture hundreds of colours using a set of colour chips ranging from opaque to translucent. Such an impressive array of colours was not always possible. Discovered in the mid-1800s plastics offer some unique properties, but originally colour was not a feature. Alexander Parkes' cellulose nitrate material, first shown at the Crystal Palace International Exhibition in 1862, could be `made of the most brilliant colours', but was not. Researchers generally agree that most material breakthroughs came in the early 1900s. In 1907 Leo Baekeland, a New York chemist, produced phenol formaldehyde, the first truly synthetic plastic, known today as Bakelite. Although famed for its `fishy' smell when hot, Bakelite was widely used for electrical fittings in the 1930s, but again these were not particularly colourful items. Mouldings cast from phenol formaldehyde, made as rods and cut into usable objects such as napkin rings and toast racks, were normally amber coloured. In the UK, British Cyanide introduced a formaldehyde moulding powder that could be produced in white and hence various pale shades. Casein was also popular at ...Read More