Overt Product Authentication

What is Overt Product Authentication?

Overt product authentication is a method of checking a product’s or packaging’s authenticity without specialist knowledge or equipment.

Brandstrike’s overt product authentication solutions use metameric pigments from Stardust Materials LLC which are inorganic rare-earth oxides that are chemically/thermally stable and their colours change according to the light source.

STARDUST® metameric pigments benefit from the following:

Stable - They are not affected by humidity, elevated temperature, direct sunlight, UV, or aggressive chemical environment. Their lifetime is immeasurable.

Secure - unique and extremely hard to reverse engineer. All these materials have been developed in-house. They are also produced exclusively in our facilities and distributed to our clients under strict chain-of-custody agreements.

Price - highly competitive prices when compared to other product authentication technologies on the market

Simple Authentication - In order to detect the metameric pigments you only need a ubiquitous, energy saving

fluorescent bulb. The authentication process involves moving the security feature from a sun/incandescent lighted area (e.g. a window or a desk lamp) to a spot under the fluorescent bulb while observing the color shift.

Applications

• Security printing of stamps, cheques, credit cards, licenses etc
• Used in making tamper evident seals for pharmaceuticals and other products
• Invisible security features which are printed on products, packaging and labels.

Benefits of STARDUST® metameric pigments over metameric dyes

• Common metameric dyes that change their colors under black (UV) light are organic and thus unstable having a relatively short life span.
• The very UV light used to trigger the metameric effect in the dyes is damaging to their polymer structure; this is not the case with the inorganic pigments.
• The observable colour shift of the STARDUST® metamerics is more dramatic than that of the dyes.
• The security of metameric organic dyes is questionable due to their high availability.

The table below lists the metameric pigment families and their principal color responses (variations are possible):