Colour Measurement for Powdered Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products

Within the pharmaceutical and personal care products industries, powdered products represent a significant proportion of colour measurement applications, both in cosmetic powders but also as raw materials and as process steps on the way to finished products. To measure powdered products, or even granules and particle sizes in between, the sample is pressed to a flat and consistent surface, and measured in reflectance.

For powdered cosmetics, colour is used as a selling point; the ability to specify and produce new colours or match to seasonal trends is a source of competitive advantage. For pharmaceuticals the ability to make the colour of products "fit in" or meet expectation cannot be understated.

Providing a product with a high perceived quality that is consistent and matches the consumer expectation are core to the user experience and essential to brands within the industry, as well as the ability to offer a wide range of colour products and to react quickly to the market.

Digital colour and appearance data can be used to expedite the supply process, greatly improving companies' ability to react to the market by reducing the risks and costs associated with producing, distributing, and maintaining physical standards.

Colour measurement, applied when visiting with customers, agreeing specifications with suppliers, in product innovation development laboratories, benchmarking industry competitors, or reporting for internal quality control programs, can build supply chain relationships based on quality, consistency, and reducing subjectivity from specification and approval.

Konica Minolta has a dedicated team of experts responsible for implementing, training, optimising, and customising systems for colour formulation and digital colour data communication. 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 Measuring Instruments can help producers to deliver accuracy, certainty, and traceability for the production of powdered materials. Our instruments and software are easy to use whilst providing vital colour and colour difference data to operators in development laboratories, in production, or in quality control. Whether used for goods in, development, process control, or quality control, implementing colour data and colour communication can help optimise processes and deliver a product with higher perceived quality. Our experts can help you to establish a system that will ultimately reduce waste, whether this is by improving communication and tolerances with suppliers, spotting production issues that cause deviations early and being able to cost effectively correct them, or even removing some subjectivity from QC processes.

Konica Minolta benchtop and portable spectrophotometers are widely used in the Pharmaceutical and Personal Care industries. The instrument selection will largely be down to your processes and any additional processes that you may need, like also measuring liquid products with the same device for example.  Our experienced teams can recommend a solution, and our extensive service network can ensure that your instruments are maintained and traceable throughout their life.