Skin care company Arizona Sun aims for TSA-approved packaging

Unless you have a short bob, a travel-sized bottle of shampoo is not nearly enough for a weekend away, and a tiny bottle of SPF-30 will hardly get you through a single day on a Cancun beach.

So Scottsdale-based Arizona Sun’s owners Robert and Ellen Wallace are packing their most popular skin care products into 3-ounce bottles and stuffing a quartet of them into a 1-quart plastic pouch so air travelers can carry their essential liquids on board.

There’s even wiggle room for a tube of lip balm, which Arizona Sun also sells, or a swig-size bottle of mouthwash, which it doesn’t.

The local entrepreneurs slap a label on the outside of the pouch listing the latest — at least as of deadline for this story — Transportation Security Administration rules for carry-ons.

The Wallaces started Arizona Sun 25 years ago as an aside to keep Ellen, who dropped out of the corporate world, busy. Now they sell more than $1 million worth of skin care products a year in more than 1,000 drugstores, gift shops and supermarkets around the country, Robert Wallace said.

Their products are made from American Indian-favored ingredients — mistletoe, jojoba, aloe vera, cactus flower, for example — as well as the usual — water, glycerin and the like — and sport a colorful, stylized Sonoran Desert scene on the label.

The product line is really new packaging of old favorites. The TSA, the government watchdog organization designed to keep us safe in the skies, has been known to revise the rules about what passengers can bring on board. The aim, the feds have said, is to keep potential terrorists on their toes.

It’s also keeping security checkpoint trash bins full, as vacationers guess wrong whether a 4-ounce bottle of hand-sanitizer, a tube of lip gloss, fingernail clippers or a butane lighter is OK to carry on board.

Regarding liquids, the most recent rule is: 3-ounce bottles are OK, as many as can be contained in a 1-quart plastic bag with one such bag allowed per passenger.

“Since the new security rules, people have had to change how they travel,” Robert Wallace said. Not only did people have to toss their toiletries to pass checkpoints, they also stopped buying them.

Arizona Sun sells most of its products, from shower gel to sunscreen, in 4-, 8-, 16- and 50-ounce sizes — all too big to pass TSA muster.

The Wallaces watched sales of their skin care products plummet in airport stores, whereas previously the made-in-Arizona goods were hot take-home gifts purchased at the last minute and stuffed into carry-ons.

The company also makes 1-ounce travel-size bottles of several items.

“But if you’re going to Mexico for the weekend, 1 ounce of sunscreen is not enough,” Ellen Wallace said. “We wanted something that would at least get you through a trip.”

So the Wallaces scouted out a local manufacturer of 3-ounce plastic bottles and poured shampoo, moisturizer, and three kinds of sunscreen into them.

If the new packaging flies, so to speak, they’ll add conditioner and shower gel to the mix. They also plan to sell empty bottles with the Arizona Sun logo and write-on labels so customers can fill the containers themselves.

The Wallaces hope to have the pouches in Valley stores within a week, Ellen Wallace said. She’s already tested prototypes during her last flight and said she got a thumbs up from a TSA screener, who especially liked the TSA-friendly label.