Luxe Pack Monaco 2026, held from 28–30 September on the French Riviera, delivered one clear verdict for premium beauty packaging: the hottest new material is sound.

Cosmetics Business, reporting from the annual show, identified sonic identity among the trends set to shape future beauty packaging — and the development with the most immediate commercial weight comes from IRCAM Amplify, the commercial arm of IRCAM, one of the world's leading acoustic and audio research centres.

The company has already partnered with L'Oréal, giving the concept a concrete link to the world's largest beauty multinational rather than a laboratory-only proposition.

What does sonic packaging actually mean for formulators and brand teams?

The logic is straightforward. As beauty brands push to add excitement to the unboxing experience, the noises a pack makes — the rustle of a material, the click or reveal of an opening box — become an additional sensorial layer in packaging conception.

For packaging designers and brand managers, that reframes decisions that were previously purely visual and tactile:

• Material selection now carries an acoustic dimension: paper weights, closures and mechanisms must be judged by how they sound, not only how they look and feel.
• Unboxing choreography enters the design brief, with the opening sequence treated as a composed experience rather than an afterthought.
• Sonic identity joins colour, typography and finish as a brand asset that can be specified, tested and protected.

The involvement of a research body of IRCAM's standing matters here. Acoustic engineering is a specialised discipline, and brands that lack in-house audio expertise will likely need external partners to translate a "premium sound" ambition into measurable material and structural choices.

Why is this landing now?

The unboxing moment has become a primary marketing surface, driven by social video where the sound of a product being opened reaches audiences before any copy or claim does. A pack that performs acoustically extends the brand experience into channels where packaging is heard but not touched.

L'Oréal's partnership with IRCAM Amplify signals that a major player sees enough value to move first. When a multinational commits to an experimental category, suppliers of closures, folding cartons and flexible materials should expect follow-on enquiries from prestige and mass-premium brands seeking comparable differentiation.

For procurement teams, the near-term implication is a widening specification. Requests for proposals may start to include acoustic performance criteria alongside barrier properties, sustainability credentials and decoration options — a new line of qualification work for converters.

For compliance and marketing teams, sound remains a comparatively unregulated territory compared with visual claims, though any sonic branding that implies product performance would still fall under conventional advertising rules.

What comes next?

The credible next data points to watch are the first commercial launches from the IRCAM Amplify–L'Oréal collaboration, and whether competing multinationals announce their own acoustic partnerships by the time Luxe Pack Monaco reconvenes next September.