Six materials cover almost every cosmetic pack we run. The choice is decided by four things, in this order: what is inside, what the pack has to survive, what it should look like on a shelf, and what the unit cost has to be. Aesthetics come last because a beautiful pack that leaches plasticiser into a retinol serum is not a pack — it is a recall.
Our 3134 stock moulds break down by material like this — these are counts of moulds, not of SKUs, and they tell you what is realistically available without a tooling fee.
| Mixed — 1512 moulds | |
| PP — 402 moulds | Chemically inert, cheap, opaque or clarified. The default for anything with a solvent load. |
| Glass — 366 moulds | Best barrier, heaviest, the only genuinely impermeable option here. |
| PET — 249 moulds | Cheapest clear option. Stress-cracks with alcohol and essential-oil loads. |
| Acrylic — 206 moulds | PMMA outer jacket over an inner PP or AS bottle — shelf presence, not a contact material. |
| PETG — 167 moulds | Clear, thicker-looking than PET, more forgiving chemically. The look of glass without the weight. |
| Aluminum — 133 moulds | Absolute barrier, lightweight, premium. The answer for light-sensitive oils. |
| PE — 95 moulds | Squeezable and inert — the material tubes are made from. |
| AS — 3 moulds | Styrene-acrylonitrile: hard, very clear, used for thick-wall jars and airless bodies. |
| ABS — 1 moulds | Hard engineering plastic, used here for airless bodies that need a rigid shoulder. |
PET is the wrong answer for anything with a strong solvent load. Essential-oil-heavy formulas, high-alcohol toners and anything above roughly 20% ethanol will stress-crack PET over time, and it happens in the field, not in the lab. PETG is more forgiving and clearer, which is why it dominates our bottle-and-jar sets. PP and HDPE are the chemically inert options — if your formula is aggressive, the answer is almost always PP or glass.
Retinol, vitamin C and any oxidation-sensitive active need the pack to keep air out, which is a dispenser question more than a material one — see airless vs dropper vs pump. The material still matters: opaque or frosted beats clear for anything photo-degradable, because light is the second oxidant after oxygen.
Acrylic (PMMA) is an outer shell, not a contact material. On our set moulds it is the thick transparent jacket over an inner PP or AS bottle. That construction gives you the heavy, glass-like shelf presence at a fraction of glass weight — and the fill never touches the acrylic.
Glass is the only material here that is genuinely impermeable; it is also the only one that breaks, and it weighs about twice as much as PETG for the same capacity. Air freight is charged by weight and volume, so a glass decision is a logistics decision: a 100 ml glass bottle costs meaningfully more to ship than the same bottle in PETG, and that difference is usually larger than the pack cost itself.
Under identical decoration, the perceived quality order is roughly: heavy acrylic jacket > glass > thick-walled PETG > PET > PP. But under identical decoration is doing the work in that sentence — frosting, a soft-touch lacquer or a metallised collar will move the perception of a PP bottle further than the choice of resin will.
Packaging cost is a function of weight and of how many you take. Because every mould here already exists, the resin is nearly the whole story: PP is cheapest, PET and PETG sit above it, glass and aluminium above that, and an acrylic-jacketed set is a two-piece assembly and is priced as one. Decoration is a separate line and is usually a fixed cost per position rather than a per-unit one.
If you are still deciding what goes inside the pack, start from the formula database — the fill decides the pack more often than the other way round.
Send us the fill and we will come back with the pack, the decoration and one FOB price covering both, within 24 hours. 3134 moulds are in production — there is no tooling fee at any size.
Start a combined quote →