Why the color always not nice on my custom car air fresheners?

I have to confess in our product category, paper car air freshener is the most difficult to print, you will generally never get a perfect match between artwork colour and printed colour. The reasons are many, but the main reason that effect the printing quality is the perfume.

Let’s talk about the perfume factor that effects the printing color first, then we will find out the rest.

As we know printing ink is a kind of liquid that print on the paper, almost all paper would absorb the ink or just let it dry on surface naturally to maintain the colors on them. Normally, printing ink cannot be dissolved by water, but some liquid would dissolve the ink, can be alcohol, can be olive oil, can be perfume. It is a complex chemical reaction but this do not means these liquid is toxic or corrosive, alcohol is still save to drink, olive oil is still save to cook. You can do a small experiment at home to drop some body perfume on your books then wait and see what will happen.

Some of our clients complaint the printing color is very dull on their custom car air fresheners, besides the above reason, do remind that some perfumes are transparent, but some perfumes are light champagne color, please see the picture on the right side, here you can see different perfume has different color, so colors overlap colors, the original color changes.

But do remember that some transparent perfume can also change printing color.

Now lets talk about other factors that effects the printing quality besides the perfume. Paper and color selections for a design can also have an enormous impact on how true colours reproduce in print.

Paper type
Print quality is also affected by the type of paper used as well as the selected print or copy resolution. The paper we used on our custom car air fresheners is absorbent paper, we make it 2mm thick absorbent cardboard to enable the freshener absorb as much perfume as possible to keep the nice smell longer time. Not like normal A4 paper or art paper we use in our daily life, absorbent paper is a specially made paper with a very rough surface, and when we print on it, it absorb more printing ink than we print on normal paper like copper paper.

Below is an example for using the same printer, same color setting, but print on two different papers, the top one is print on copper paper (normally used for making fridge magnet), the bottom one is print on absorbent paper. You can see the color is very sharp and bright on copper paper, very detailed of the words and logos, but pretty dull and blurry on absorbent paper, makes it look like a ‘poor quality’ production.

In this case, if we are making pre-production samples for our clients, they would normally asked us to improve the printing quality, in face, this has nothing to do with ‘printing quality’, no matter how we set up the printer, , the color is not possible to print as sharp as how we did on copper paper, and, we cannot use copper paper to make air freshener. So at this point, if client have strict requirement on printing color, we would suggest him to change other custom promotional products like fridge magnets, bookmarks, badges which are easier to print than car freshener.

Rush Order
Rush order also difficult to guarantee good quality production either. Below is the main process for how a custom car air fresheners being made.

Make Print plate—->Print—-> laminate—-> die cut—-> hang string—> perfume—-> packing

After the paper print out, we cannot do the paper lamination immediately, we would have to put the paper on cool place to let the ink dry thoroughly for a few days then to do the lamination. After lamination, another round of waiting for the glue to dry take another 2-3 days, after that, we can then apply the perfume on the freshener. No matter you order 300pcs or 10,000pcs, it takes at least 10 days to make good quality paper air fresheners. Shrink production time for any process would cause quality problem, if we do not wait the ink to dry thoroughly and rush to do the lamination, the glue would probably ruin the printing color, plus the perfume factor, the color would be very poor on the air freshener.

Before you place an order on us, here are some tips for color selection and perfume selection to make an satisfied custom car air fresheners.

• Never make full dark design, for example, the background is black, words and logo design in grey, dark blue, dark red, brown color, after perfume put on, you can hardly see the dull words on it. If a black background is a must, then use white or other light color for the words and logos.

Choose bright color like blue, orange, grass to make your air freshener looks vivid and smart!

• If you have strict printing color requirement, but low requirement on scent type, please choose mild scents like lemon, jasmine, lime, ocean rather than strong scents, the stronger the scents, the easier it would darken the paper color. Strong scents like vanilla, coconut, coffee, new car, sandalwoods are long lasting scents, they tend to be more easier to darken the printing color.

Different clients have different concerns, some clients that absolutely do not mind the printing quality of the air freshener at all, they just want strong and long lasting perfume, but some clients do want the printing can match its original design file, just choose perfume and design as your actual requirements.