Luxe Pack Monaco 2026: Traceability, Beauty Tech and Brand Reputation
Luxe Pack Monaco 2026 made one thing clear: luxury packaging is no longer judged only by how it looks, but by what it can prove. Traceability, efficacy and materials with a radically lower footprint ran through every talk and stand I visited in Monaco, from 28th to 30th September.
I walked the show and past the moss-covered Luxe Pack sign at the entrance and into a day of panels, prototypes and conversations with suppliers. Here is what stood out.
TRASCE: three years of building traceable beauty supply chains
The most practical talk in the morning came from TRASCE, the Traceability Alliance for Sustainable Cosmetics. Its mission is to improve traceability and sustainability across beauty supply chains, and after three years the consortium came to Monaco to share what has worked.
The panel brought together brands and suppliers:
Morgane Toutain, EMEA and Americas Sustainability Director, Shiseido
Théa Ngambé, Product's CSR Data Leader, Albéa
Julie Belin Declerck, Direct Purchasing Director, Clarins
Stéphanie, Director, Formes de Luxe
Three messages stood out:
One tool for the whole industry. Packaging gets most of the attention, but the scope goes further, into raw materials and direct purchasing. A common tool means buyers and suppliers answer the same questions once, in the same way.
Suppliers are brought along, not just asked. The consortium runs events and supplier webinars. Albéa described sending its own documentation and references to suppliers and holding one-on-one meetings to help them onboard.
Trust is designed in. Deloitte has supported the consortium from the start, and the group is aligned on compliance, antitrust and data-privacy rules for the data members need to collect.
For Clarins, traceability is now built into purchasing itself, driven by a wish to make supply chains more resilient after recent disruptions. The panel's shared conclusion: roles and practices that used to sit apart are becoming shared and fully integrated.
Nuon Medical: designing for efficacy
After lunch, Alain Dijkstra, Founder and CEO of Nuon Medical, took the stage for "Designing for Efficacy: The New Rules of Cosmetics", in conversation with Formes de Luxe. His argument: the next wave of beauty is personalised, device-led and part of daily life.
He showed two new concepts.
Custom-made cosmetics on demand. The idea is simple: skin data in, a personalised gel mask out. The machine works in five steps:
Detect — a skin analyser reads moisture, oil, pH and skin condition.
Formulate — it generates a recipe: powders, ratios, water volume and pH.
Dose and adjust — powder bins (coffee, orange, strawberry and more) dose automatically, with pH-matched water.
Make — everything is mixed into a fresh gel mask, with a screen and sound alert when it is ready.
Self-clean — all channels auto-rinse, and waste water goes to a removable tray.
Beauty tech bag charms. Nuon has taken fashion's favourite accessory and turned it into a skincare ritual: an active module inside a pocket-size charm that clips onto bags, keys and belts. The pitch rests on three ideas: the brand is worn and seen every day, made for social feeds; it is always within reach for on-the-go touch-ups; and seasonal colours, finishes and limited drops make it collectible.
For packaging teams, both concepts blur the line between pack, device and product. The container is no longer just protecting a formula; it is delivering it.
On the show floor: less material, more intelligence
Two stands showed how sustainability is moving from claims to engineering.
Raiku makes protective packaging from thin wooden spirals. The spring structure absorbs shock and vibration, so it can cradle a glass bottle inside a wooden case, and the material is natural and compostable, with no chemicals. Raiku presents it as the lowest-footprint packaging material in the world. Compared with one square metre of paper, the company says it needs:
Resource | Raiku vs 1 m² of paper |
Water | 2,000× less |
Energy | 50× less |
Wood | 10× less |
Chemicals | 0 (instead of 50) |
It also looks beautiful, which matters in luxury: the protection becomes part of the unboxing.
Raiku also pitched on the Luxe Pack in Green stage. Its starting point: paper already holds 50% of the EU packaging market and keeps growing, but making it takes 10–20 hours of crushing, hydrolysis, delignification and papermaking, with chemicals and water at almost every step. Raiku turns raw wood or offcuts into veneer and then into springs in about 30 seconds, using only electricity and humidified air. On its slide, that means 90% less wood, 99.9% less water, 98% less energy and zero chemicals, or over 10× fewer resources overall.
The company is no longer just a prototype. Its technology is IP-protected, it has gone through the LVMH accelerator and the European Innovation Council Accelerator, and it has won the Paris Sustainable Packaging Award and the Milan Avant-Garde Award. Product and pricing are validated in 20+ countries, backed by more than €6.5M in public and private investment.
Ma Balise (stand AA18, a 2025 Luxe Pack in Green winner) is rethinking the RFID tag. A classic tag stacks seven layers, including PVC and PET adhesive layers and a silicone liner. Its Ephém tag cuts that to four: FSC paper, a printed antenna, an adhesive layer and a release liner. Fewer layers means less plastic on every tracked pack, which links neatly back to the traceability debate.
The Future Laboratory: Global Drivers 2027+
The big-picture session came from The Future Laboratory, which presented six global drivers it sees shaping luxury and packaging from 2027 onwards.
Driver | What it means | Key themes |
Colliding Technologies | Biology and tech merge: "living materials" combine microorganisms with materials like wood to sense, self-repair and adapt. At the same time, people want more control and a return to tangible, analogue experiences. | Bio-intelligent systems, human agency |
Diverging Demographics | Populations age in some regions and grow younger in others; less traditional life paths make old social and economic models outdated. | Fluid lives, chosen belonging, self-determination, unequal access, longevity |
Fragmenting Societies | Shared democratic foundations weaken as political groups, platforms and economic systems benefit from division and instability. | Individualism, inequality, nostalgia, belonging, trust |
Climate Adaptation | Extreme weather creates new risks for people, businesses and governments, while climate action stays uneven. | Adaptation, resilience, regeneration, scarcity, default sustainability |
Globalisation Reordered | Trade and cooperation are splitting as power spreads across more countries and blocs, with no agreement yet on what comes next. | Fragmentation, sovereignty, power shifts, localisation, global culture |
Urbanised World | Cities stay centres of opportunity and culture, but are changing with climate risk, new ways of working and migration. | Local living, wellbeing, urban growth, smart cities, accessibility |
Three data points from the slides stayed with me:
By the late 2070s, people aged 65+ will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in history (UN).
7 in 10 people globally are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who differs from them in values, beliefs or background (Edelman Trust Barometer 2026).
About half of global GDP, £33 trillion (€38.6 trillion), depends moderately or heavily on healthy ecosystems (World Economic Forum).
Global trade hit a record £26.1 trillion (€32.2 trillion) in 2025, driven by East Asia and South–South trade corridors (UN Trade & Development).
Cities cover just 2% of the world's land but consume over 75% of its material resources and generate 85% of global GDP (Arup).
For packaging, the message is that one global pack no longer fits all. Localised supply, ageing consumers, trust and resource scarcity will all shape design briefs.
The Refill Shift: refill without compromise
The afternoon panel "The Refill Shift: Rethinking Products, Packaging and Experience" made the case that refill is now a global expectation, but in prestige beauty it only works if it never feels like a downgrade.
On stage were:
Dania Blin, Director Sustainability & Science, YSL Beauty
Mark Paton, Founder, Here Design
Aline Roland, International Marketing & Communications Director, Albéa
Isabelle Lallemant, Global Marketing Director Beauty
The slides set out a "prestige refill promise" tailored to each beauty segment:
Segment | The promise | Examples shown |
Fragrance | Preserve the ritual: refill must be seamless, intuitive and desirable in every cycle | Replay™ connector |
Skincare | Uncompromised formula integrity, reliable dispensing from first use to last, secure assembly | Guerlain |
Make-up and haircare | Non-negotiable design criteria: clean, secure, intuitive | Prada Beauty foundation, Kérastase Elixir Ultime (refill in 3 steps) |
Global brands | One vision, multiple solutions: a platform flexible across regions and refill formats | Stella McCartney |
YSL Beauty showed how refill becomes a brand story rather than a technical footnote. Its "Join the Refill Movement" campaign promotes refillable fragrances, and the main product for each brand including the YSL Skin Affair Glow Cushion Foundation refill, using Dua Lipa as ambassador to make the refill movement part of the main stream.
Albéa summed up its own approach in one line: designed to be refilled, designed to be kept. Its refillable formats, including Dome Kiss, Twirl and Sphea, aim for an intuitive gesture, an attractive object and an optimised refill.
Albéa's Endless Kiss is a refillable lipstick made in France and built for the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). Its pitch is "refill, recycle, repeat":
Designed for recycling: three parts, all in PP, so the pack is a 100% PP mono-material that fits existing PP recycling streams and anticipates 2030 EU requirements.
Material choice: available in virgin PP or PCR without losing precision or reliability in the mechanism.
Refillable: up to 10 refill cycles while keeping the premium experience.
Material efficient: 62.3% less material over 10 refills than a conventional lipstick pack.
A wine example showed that eco-design is not limited to beauty. Speakers cited the Galoupet rosé bottle, made from recycled glass in a cinnamon tint. It won a Formes de Luxe award and, they said, changed the rosé market by using far more recycled content and cutting carbon emissions sharply.
The panel's wider point was about people, not just materials. Eco-design metrics are improving year after year because companies are engaging every team, from development, procurement and marketing to production and quality. And they are keeping that effort going even in a tough economic climate.
C-Itech, a 2026 Luxe Pack in Green nominee (booth DF09 BIS), presented a thin-walled glass bottle made from drawn glass tube instead of moulded glass. For a 30 ml bottle, it weighs 12 g versus about 69 g for a traditional equivalent.
C-Itech's cradle-to-customer figures for one 30 ml bottle:
Bottle | Weight | Total CO2e |
C-Itech drawn glass | 12 g | 26.63 g |
Traditional moulded glass | 69 g | 109.02 g |
That is roughly a fourfold cut in emissions. The company also points to shorter transport: its plant in Chartres sits in France's Cosmetic Valley, close to around 100 cosmetics companies nearby and 250 across the Centre-Val de Loire region. The soda-lime glass is fully and endlessly recyclable in existing glass bins, and production scrap is ground into glass powder for other uses.
Luxe Pack in Green: the next materials and systems
The Luxe Pack in Green session, run with Infinity Global, gave nominees a few minutes each to pitch to a jury of brand-side sustainability and packaging leaders. C-Itech and Raiku (above) were part of it; these were the other pitches that stood out.
The 2026 jury included:
Hélène Villecroze, Product Sustainability Lead, Chanel
Stéphane Bernelas, Purchasing Director Hennessy & Primary Packaging, Moët Hennessy
Nicolas Monet, Packaging Director, Groupe Yves Rocher
Véronique Laplane, Circularity and Innovation Director
Jérémy Alonso, Head of Innovation
Dania Blin, Director of Sustainability and Science, YSL Beauty
The jury's comments set the tone. Hélène Villecroze said brands can feel the change in their own stores: consumers have higher expectations and ask more and more questions. Packaging is now part of a wider CSR agenda, also driven by regulations such as the PPWR that raise the bar.
The jury also saw a sign of maturity in this year's entries. Many came with measured environmental data, a trend that keeps improving each year. Entries ranged from start-ups with early-stage concepts to large companies sharing multi-year innovation plans. And more of them now directly address PPWR requirements, such as recycled plastic content and recyclability.
FungiFuture: paper made from fungi
FungiFuture started from a simple fact: paper makes up about a third of global packaging, and the pulp and paper industry is resource-intensive. One tonne of paper takes 10–20 trees and 30–50 tonnes of water.
Their answer is fungi as a third category of natural fibre for papermaking. Instead of wood fibres built from cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, they use hyphal fibres from mushrooms, built from chitin, β-glucans and proteins.
Injectose: cellulose you can mould like plastic
Injectose turns cellulose into a granule that can be injection-moulded. It mixes cellulose fibres, a bio-based additive and water, then extrudes them. The additive coats the fibres and creates a lubricating layer, so the cellulose can flow through an extruder like a plastic.
Its first showcase is Re(Cap), a perfume cap prototype that is resistant to alcohol, colourable, printable and recyclable. That is a direct answer to one of fragrance's hardest components to make sustainable.
Anaïk: making eco-design a team sport
Anaïk, which makes pouches and gift packaging for brands such as L'Occitane and Calvin Klein Fragrances, presented "Impact Orders", a programme to reward eco-design and engage its teams.
It works in five steps:
Anaïk Now: an eco-design framework with three principles to guide choices.
Eco-design Cloud: objective eco-scores that measure the environmental impact of 100% of orders.
Impact Orders: a monthly event that honours the team behind the most exemplary order.
Chari Tips: a €100 donation, with the winning team choosing the organisation.
Organisations: supporting causes that matter to the teams.
Amcor: recycling starts at sorting
Amcor showed how waste becomes a premium pack, from mixed plastic bales to La Rosée's refillable deodorant. Quality is the challenge: every batch of recycled material must meet FDA standards for performance and EA requirements for compliance.
Its key message: "Sorting is where it all starts. After that, there is no way back." Its CleanStream process runs from multi-layer sorting through intensive washing, decontamination and devolatilisation, then testing and screening to reach food-contact quality.
Since 2024, Amcor has worked with Greyparrot to use AI in waste sorting. The system fits into existing infrastructure and moves from monitoring to real-time optimisation. It identifies recoverable materials better, anticipates contamination, shares data across the value chain and gives measurable results on polypropylene streams.
The results so far:
Result | Change | What it means |
Machine downtime | −33% | Fewer blockages, higher machine efficiency |
Annual output | +2.6% | +300 tonnes in 6 months, about 600 tonnes a year |
Higher-value rPP stream | +11% | More home and industrial volumes moved into contact-sensitive rPP |
On display: the Luxe Pack in Green showcase
Beyond the stage, the Luxe Pack in Green area showed the nominees' products side by side. Six stood out for me:
Company (booth) | Innovation | Key claim |
House of Taejin (DA03) | Bamboo bio-material bottle with an all-PP, metal-free pump | Up to 30% less plastic, 15% more structural hardness, recyclable as one material |
C-Itech (DF09 BIS) | Thin-walled bottles blown from drawn glass | Complex, non-symmetrical shapes; lighter packs mean lower transport costs and CO2 |
Scaeva (DE01) | Display stand in corn-starch PLA with a 100% cotton covering | Up to 75% lower carbon footprint than fossil plastics; compostable in 3–6 months industrially |
ESKA (RC02) | Premium 2 mm solid board with Releaf outer layers made from fallen leaves | No virgin fibres: 100% recycled core, 100% circular |
Excelpack (VA10) | NOTPAPER, a mineral-based material made mainly from calcium carbonate | No wood, chlorine or water; up to 67% lower CO2 than paper |
Nimetex Groupe (RD24) | DATTERA, a pouch covered in recovered date pits, with a palm-wood closure | Turns agricultural and textile waste into reusable luxury packaging |
Taejin's bottle mixes bamboo biomass into PP resin. Because the pump has no metal spring, the whole unit can go into a single PP recycling stream with no disassembly.
Scaeva's stand needs no changes to existing manufacturing. At end of life, the fabric and PLA separate by hand.
ESKA turns fallen leaves into a board with a natural, speckled look, so the sustainability story is visible and tactile.
NOTPAPER is water-, grease- and tear-resistant and safe for food contact. It is designed to be kept and reused rather than thrown away.
DATTERA is made by hand in Tunisia. Date pits are collected, cleaned, polished and fixed one by one onto a pouch sewn from Nimetex's own textile offcuts, with cords in recycled cotton and olive-wood beads.
From constraint to creativity: regulation as a design driver
The panel "From Constraint to Creativity: Turning Regulation into a Design and Brand Driver" argued that rules like the PPWR do not have to flatten design. Used well, they can sharpen it.
Lighter glass, same look. One example showed a fragrance bottle redesigned so that it looks just as premium from the outside while using about 40% less glass, down to 220 g. It keeps the same filling capacity and equivalent mechanical strength. It also adds a refill-ready screw neck, uses less virgin material through post-consumer (PCR) and post-industrial (PIR) recycled glass, and contains no substances of concern, in line with PPWR compliance.
Protecting the juice. Another slide compared UV protection in flint glass. Plain flint glass lets most UV light through, while a UV-blocking coating or UV protection built into the glass itself cuts it sharply below 400 nm. Better protection means a more stable formula inside a clear, recyclable bottle.
Design still carries the story. The design agency We Are Aktivists showed how sustainability and symbolism can work together:
Absolutas Puig: the 1960s flagship that built the Puig house, redesigned in glass, wood and leather. It is presented as Puig's sustainability flagship, with noble, recyclable and refillable materials.
Rabanne Invictus: the trophy bottle redesigned with sharper angles and facets instead of soft curves, to reinforce the idea of strength and victory.
Good Girl: the stiletto bottle, here in a limited edition with a houndstooth, fashion-inspired finish and gold accents.
The panel's closing question summed it up: "Consumer expectations and regulatory demand must be educated." Its main point was that formula and pack shape each other. The formulation informs the pack, and the pack changes the formulation; a well-protected product improves the formula, but the pack can also interact with it.
What I'm taking home
Traceability is becoming shared infrastructure. Alliances like TRASCE show that brands and suppliers gain more from one common tool than from competing questionnaires.
Refill has to feel premium. YSL, Albéa and the Refill Shift panel agree: a refill that compromises the ritual will not be used.
Eco-design is now measured in grams and CO2e. Endless Kiss cuts 62.3% of material over 10 refills; C-Itech's 12 g bottle cuts emissions about fourfold. The Luxe Pack in Green jury saw more entries backed by measured data than ever.
New materials are coming from unexpected places. Fungi, bamboo, corn starch, fallen leaves, calcium carbonate and date pits all aim to replace resource-heavy paper and plastic.
Recycling quality starts upstream. Amcor's AI sorting shows that better data at the sorting line means more, and higher-value, recycled material.
Regulation can drive design. Lighter glass, refill-ready necks and UV protection show the PPWR can push brands to better packs, not plainer ones.
Packaging is turning into a device. Nuon's machine and bag charms show a future where the pack doses, personalises and travels with the consumer.
Design for the world that's coming. Ageing populations, falling trust, reordered trade, cities, climate risk and the PPWR will shape what luxury consumers expect from every pack.
Luxe Pack Monaco remains the place where these threads meet. I left with new contacts, new ideas and a clear sense that the most interesting packaging work today happens where sustainability, technology and design overlap.
Want to explore how the latest trends and innovations could transform your packaging? Book a discovery call with us and let's discuss the opportunities for your business.
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