Coloring of Plastics

In the coloring of plastics, a plastic must be opaque before color pigments are used for shading and white pigments are generally used for white coloring and color pigments are added for shading.

Titanium dioxide is generally used because of its excellent hiding power - the ability to hide (make plastic opaque).

In using white pigment to make plastic opaque results in a fairly large amount of pigments and this raises the price of the colored plastic. Colorists are careful to maintain a low pigment loading in order to offer better pricing.

And it is common to have requests asking for a specific color and translucency. In plastics coloring, these are the two major concerns:

- optimum pigment loading
- matching translucency

If the colorists or chemists are able to offer the above, there will be happy customers.