150814_PIGM_E News Release

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Nina Diergardt
Tel. +49 6151 72-7589

August 14, 2015 Galactic Sparkle: The New Miraval® Cosmic Pigment Range from Merck Miraval® Cosmic Gold: intensive mass tone, extraordinary brilliance Energy-charged stylings for print and plastics applications "Inside meets outside": overall gold-colored concepts with effect pigments for food and cosmetics in combination with Miraval® Cosmic Gold for packaging

Darmstadt, Germany, August 14, 2015 - Merck, a leading company for innovative and top-quality high-tech products in the healthcare, life science and performance materials sectors, is launching a new decorative effect pigment: Miraval® Cosmic Gold. The new pigment with the cosmic name is the first product in the Miraval® Cosmic range, which follows Miraval® Scenic and Miraval® Magic.
The strengths of the new pigment range include tremendous hiding power, extraordinary brilliance and intensive coloring for high-quality, fascinating designs. The new series features particle sizes and properties similar to those of the transparent Miraval® Magic, but stands out due to its more intensive mass tone. With stronger color coverage and a lively sparkle, it is supposed to call to mind shining stars - even at low concentrations. Miraval® Cosmic Gold is based on synthetic calcium aluminum borosilicate, as are all Miraval® pigments. With powerful golden sparkle, tremendous brilliance and intensive luster, it pushes product design forward into completely new dimensions. In numerous plastics applications such as extrusion, extrusion blow molding, flat film extrusion or

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injection molding and in a wide variety of printing processes such as flexographic, offset, screen and gravure printing and over-print varnishing - Miraval® Cosmic Gold provides trademark owners, designers, plastics and coating manufacturers as well as print shops with a completely new tool for stylings of extraordinary, brilliant color intensity.
A further advantage of Miraval® Cosmic Gold it that is harmonizes superbly with gold pigments from Merck for the cosmetics and food industries. Alexander Peters, Director Global Marketing Decorative Materials within Pigments & Functional Materials, describes the additional dimensions of the new pigments for a consistent, uniform brand experience as follows, "According to the principle of 'inside meets outside', our new product thus enables innovative, attractive and coherent overall concepts for the contents and packaging." said.
The galactic mission will soon go farther: In autumn, Merck will launch Miraval® Cosmic Bronze, giving the printing world and plastics manufacturers intensive interstellar bronze tones; the market can expect to see the powerful silver tones of Miraval® Cosmic Silver in 2016.

Effect pigments from Merck: Merck is one of the world's leading suppliers of effect pigments for the coatings, plastics, printing, cosmetic, food and pharmaceutical industries. Effect pigments underscore the emotional impact of color and are an important design element when creating surfaces with special impressions or qualities. Application possibilities range from cars to packaging and high-tech products up to building facades. In addition to decorative effect pigments, Merck offers pigments that also have functional applications such as heat-reflecting or anti-counterfeiting pigments. Merck is a leading company for innovative and top-quality high-tech products in the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. The company generated sales of €11.3 billion in 2014 with its six businesses EMD Serono, Consumer Health, Allergopharma, Biosimilars, EMD Millipore and Performance Materials. Around

39,000 employees work in 66 countries to improve the quality of life for patients, to further the success of customers, and to help meet global challenges. Merck is the world's oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company - since 1668, the company has stood for innovation, business success and responsible

entrepreneurship. Holding an approximately 70% interest, the founding family remains the majority owner of the company to this day. Merck, Darmstadt, Germany holds the global rights to the Merck name and brand. The only exceptions are Canada and the United States, where the company operates as EMD Serono, EMD Millipore and EMD Performance Materials.

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