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Paint and ink
All Containers›Shop by use case›Paint and ink›What goes wrong›It separated, or dried in the neckShop all paint and ink →
What goes wrong

It separated, or dried in the neck

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page8
Most of these are normal behavior badly packaged, not a formulation fault.

Hard settling

Pigment that has compacted at the base and will not lift with shaking. Enough headspace to let the contents move, and a neck wide enough to take a stirrer, are both packaging answers to a formulation behavior.

Skinning in the neck and threads

Anything that films in air will do it, and then the cap grinds on dried product and stops sealing. A closure with a clean sealing land and a liner that actually contacts it slows this considerably.

Filled too full to remix

A bottle filled to the shoulder cannot be shaken. That is a fill-level decision, it looks generous on the shelf, and it makes the product worse in the hand.

Temperature cycling helps nothing

A product shipped through heat and cold separates faster and may not recombine. Worth knowing before choosing a shipping season or a warehouse, and worth saying in the storage advice.

Say what is normal

Separation and settling in a pigmented liquid are expected. An instruction to shake well, and a sentence saying that a layer at the bottom is not spoilage, convert the most common complaint in this category into understood behavior.

And keep the container tightly closed

Which is one of the rule’s own precautionary statements. It exists for safety reasons and it happens to be the best advice for product life as well, so the mandated sentence and the useful one coincide here.

Test with the real closure, opened repeatedly

Fill, then open and close it twenty times over a month the way a user would. Skinning, thread fouling and seal loss all need that pattern to show up, and a sealed sample left alone will never reveal them.

References

16 CFR 1500.14(b)(8)(i)(E), (F) and (G), on labeling practices: the signal word WARNING in bold capitals at least as large as the chronic hazard statement, chronic hazards grouped in descending severity, chronically hazardous components named prominently, safe handling instructions, and a list of sensitizing components. law.cornell.edu
Written from federal regulation and from measured catalog data, not from a formulation bench. Whether a specific product needs chronic hazard labeling is a toxicologist’s determination and the rule says so; nothing here substitutes for that review. Anything on these pages is a starting point.