Shiseido wins two Pentawards for a gummy-textured face wash and an Osaka Expo skincare concept

Shiseido Company, Limited said it won two prizes at Pentawards 2026, the Belgium-founded packaging-design competition now in its twentieth year, which drew more than 2,000 entries from 66 countries and regions this year.

"Hadagumi" (肌グミ), a facial cleanser built around a gummy, bouncy texture meant to make the daily chore of washing one's face something people look forward to, took Silver in the Body, Health & Beauty category; it comes in three variants with a pebble-like shape, credited to product creative director Midori Yamada. "Bi no Tama" (美の玉), an algae-derived skincare concept built to visualise the vitality of algae and the idea of circularity through its shape, colour and texture -- its metal parts hand-bent by a metal artist, its interior made from recycled resin -- took Bronze in the Professional Concepts category; Shiseido showed it at the Japan Pavilion of Expo 2025 Osaka-Kansai, and credited product creative director Hiroji Shindo of NOBUTS.

Shiseido tied the two wins to its longer-term design slogan, "beautiful in an instant, beautiful for a lifetime" (一瞬も 一生も 美しく), the company said.

A packaging award is a design-world credential, not a sales number, but it is the kind of credential that matters most to a company whose prestige business in Japan is built around department-store beauty counters: Shiseido's products are sold, touched and unboxed on the cosmetics floors of Japan's major department stores, where the physical object -- its shape, its weight, the way the cap closes -- is doing as much selling as the ingredient list. A jury recognising a gummy-textured cleanser and a hand-finished Expo showpiece is, in effect, validating the design studio that feeds those counters their next generation of display pieces.