French fashion brand Chanel is set to launch a 3D printed mascara brush in June.
Made in partnership with the Paris-based Erpro 3D Factory, the mascara brush will be the first 3D printing product to be manufactured on an industrial scale.
Announcing the launch of the Volume Révolution mascara brush, Pascale Marciniak-Davoult, the director of packaging at Chanel Parfums Beauté, said the two companies had “taken up a number of technological challenges to push the boundaries of 3D printing and offer a revolutionary product”.
“For the first time in the world, in all sectors of activity, 3D printing will be massively industrialised by Chanel Parfums Beauté.”
He says six industrial 3D printers will manufacture up to 50,000 brushes a day (or up to one million per month) by “printing successive layers of a polyamide powder polymerized with a laser beam.”
The new brushes will be “equipped with micro cavities” to absorb the mascara so that users get “the right dose” and therefore don’t need to re-dip the brush between applications.
Apart from using 3D printing for the brush’s manufacturing, Chanel also used it during the design process rather than the traditional (more time consuming and expensive) mold creation process.
This allowed the company to trial over 100 prototype before choosing the final design.
Chanel also stressed that the unique shape of the brush would not have been possible with conventional manufacturing methods.
“3D printing has allowed a more complex form of a mascara brush to allow the homogeneous distribution of the material on the eyelashes and thus offering an extreme volume without the overdose of product.”