Wauters x Alien Goddess: solar down to the packaging

The solar, divine Alien Goddess, Mugler’s flagship product, has become an essential eau de parfum in the world of perfumery. In keeping with the brand, Wauters has mobilised all its know-how to adorn the box in gold and sunlight.

Gilding all around

Alien Goddess is an extraordinary fragrance brimming with dazzling radiance and solar gold.

The entire box has been gilded to mirror the perfume’s warm, enveloping bouquet. From flats to upstrokes, hot marking can achieve great technical feats in a single sweep!

First comes the facing:
On flat areas, the hot marking gets applied to the entire box front.
First challenge: evenly depositing the hot marking on uncoated paper. The surface of uncoated paper has an exquisite texture but also presents some hurdles — its indentations and bumps affect the material’s sticking ability, making the hot marking harder to deposit.

Second challenge:
The perfect blank space for text. The gilding on flat areas leaves untouched areas for text and embossing. This comes down to smoothing the background to achieve a perfect canvas and avoid any overcrowding that could impede text visibility and legibility.

Next, the sides and the top:
Here, too, smoothness is of the utmost importance. The floral decor unfurls elegantly in precise, curved lines. How well the gilded upstrokes adhere all depends on expert machinery tuning, as well as pressure calibration and application temperature.

Responsible refinement

Mugler, a pioneer in refillable bottles, developed this new fragrance as part of a sustainable approach: traceable ingredients that preserve biodiversity and local populations, a long-lasting, refillable bottle, and an eco-designed box.
As with the Eaux de Parfum Alien product line, the packaging was designed to reduce consumption of raw materials. The brand therefore chose a “form-fitting” box, which matches the bottle’s shape more closely and which was conceived with less cardboard and hot marking film. The brand also chose WKloud for the cardboard, which is FSC-certified.

Wauters hot marking: EPV-certified expertise

For over a century, gilding has been our house’s foremost area of expertise. In the early days, the very first Wauters workshop, located in the Marais district in Paris, mostly used gilding on leather (book covers, desk pads, etc.). Our expertise broadened to include labels, then evolved towards luxury packaging in the late 1960s, taking advantage of the House’s move to the graphic arts industrial area of Villebon-sur-Yvette.

Whether on flats, in fine lines or in cylinders, hot marking is one of our two areas of expertise (the other being embossing) that were awarded and highlighted with the EPV label (Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant) in 2022. A sign of the State’s recognition, this label is given to French companies showing exceptional skill in their industry and craft.

Hot marking is a delicate step in the manufacturing process that requires a high level of technique in machinery calibration and production. We commit to passing on this expertise, which takes many years of experience to master, to new recruits. Nowadays, our expertise in hot marking is complemented by our know-how in cold marking.

We would like to thank the Mugler team for entrusting us with this project, and we are delighted to have contributed to shedding radiant light on Alien Goddess, along with its other masterpiece, Alien Goddess Intense.

The Wauters and B.Pack teams

More on Wauters and B.Pack
More on Alien Goddess
More on the EPV label