The making
Ten objects,
three materials.
Dyed board, cotton rag, matte glass. Everything else was argued out.
The objects
Heavy-base rectangular flint glass, 50 ml, flat shoulder, full-body matte. Fine-mist crimp pump. The wordmark is screen-printed in one colour at 22 mm; the record lives on a peel label on the reverse, so the information survives the carton being thrown away.
Turned aluminium, bead-blasted, full bottle width and about 40% of the body height. Unbranded, unpolished, no lacquer. It is the heaviest thing in the box and the only part you touch every day.
350–400 gsm board dyed through, not printed. A printed black scuffs white at every fold and corner; a dyed board wears to a softer black. The front carries a blind deboss at 0.35 mm depth — no ink, no foil, no register.
Indian handmade cotton rag, unbleached, 90–120 gsm, deckle edge left raw. 名残 is blind embossed at 40 mm intervals across the wrap.
A 38 mm uncoated paper sticker, one colour, no varnish, applied over the tuck. It is meant to tear. Nothing here is designed to be resealed.
Letterpressed cotton rag, 300 gsm, one per bottle, carrying all eleven fields and a blank line for the owner’s own date. It costs very little. It is the only piece most people keep.
A record is never erased. It is struck, and left readable underneath.
The opening
The seal tears. The tuck lifts. Inside, the bottle is wrapped in cotton rag with 名残 embossed into it, and the archive card sits on top — not under the bottle, where it would be found last. The card carries the archive number, the batch, the weeks it macerated and the month it was made, and a blank line for the date you opened it.
There is no ribbon, no tissue burst, no printed thank-you. The wrap is the only ceremony and it takes about four seconds. What is left afterwards is a bottle worth keeping on a shelf, a cap worth holding, and a card most people do not throw away.
What we refuse
- Foil, of any colour
- Gloss lamination
- Spot UV
- Soft-touch coating
- Metallic ink
- Magnetic closures
- A logo on more than one face
Each of these makes a box photograph better and age worse.