Avery Waterproof Labels with UltraHold Permanent Adhesive, 2" x 4", 500 Labels for Laser Printers (5523)

These were great! I ran a test print and conducted my own (maybe not so scientific) testing by freezing one label stuck to the bottom of a dinner plate with a little water in it, I left one soaking overnight in cold water stuck to a water bottle, I simmered one in water a few minutes stuck to itself folded in half, took them out dried and rubbed and there was minimal damage to the full color laser printing and the adhesive still had a decent amount of hold. This is more than your average package would go through before the contents were destroyed, so I think they hold up to their name! I wish I'd taken pictures of my method to prove this, but hopefully you'll take my word and Avery keeps up the consistent quality of their product. You can try it out yourself if you have my time.I used these for a gay pride parade, my student org passed out 400 water bottles with our and a couple other orgs' info. Printing, labels, and bottles (store brand) cost us less than 20 cents per bottle, YMMV. After riding around in a truck with ice a few hours from early morning to end of parade, then ending up in a plastic bag in my car for a week, we drank the leftovers for a few weeks (we don't drink a whole lot of disposable bottles), and my friend even carefully peeled one of the labels off to keep on her fridge! I printed them at the print shop at school, color laser. My only gripe was that it wasn't extremely obvious where to find the appropriate Microsoft Word template, but it took less than 10 minutes. Beware of printing errors, If you are inexperienced with printing on any more than regular copy paper I advise you to do the following:Purchase at least 10% more labels than you think you need if you are printing many. Stuff happens. Next, talk to the printing people wherever you go, or do it yourself at home or office, and do a test print on regular paper. This is routine for printing on more expensive papers, along with checking color and proofreading, but they won't necessarily do it for you so always ask nicely for a proof with regular paper and with your actual paper you will use. Line up the sheet with your labels against a bright light or the sun and make sure everything looks good and is a good deal within the margins. Slight misalignment is normal, design your label accordingly and save as PDF with high quality option, embed fonts, etc., if available, to make sure that no matter where you go it prints the same. With Office program files, if you open it in a different program or computer sometimes the formatting or something changes. Print shops usually ask for PDF anyway.Once you are ready, print 5 to 10 sheets at a time, or 1 to 3 at a time if it's less than 10. Keep an eye on your output. This paper can get some serious static electricity buildup which may or may not be the fault of the specific printer you are using or the paper may need special handling before loading. This happened at the print shop and several sheets came out clung together with printing crossing multiple sheets and colors were not aligned. Thankfully we only needed 400 out of the pack of 500 labels. The shop was nice and gave us some sheets of (normal paper) labels, printed and blank, and didn't charge for the ruined labels.

The media could not be loaded. Great product, me and my wife own a commercial cleaning business and we kept using the wrong labels for our spray bottles, these Avery waterproof shipping labels were just what we needed. They are very much waterproof and the text on them is bright and clear. I was a little hesitant because some reviews mentioned that the ink would smear on the labels but after some research I realized they were probably using an ink jet printer instead of a laser printer which is what the product requires. I gambled on them and I’m glad I did, turns out it was right. Just use a laser printer and they work great.

These are surprisingly durable. I use these (and the 3M brand) on metal containers that get shipped out, get wet, get left in the sun, get banged around. Out of the several thousand I have in circulation, I've only seen a few that were so worn (after 5 years of use) that they needed replacing. The glue is strong. They stay stuck. As for printing, I've used a few different brother brand laser printers and the text printed on them stays printed on. My only complaint is that there is so much static cling between the sheets, it can be tricky getting a full stack of them to feed through the paper tray on a printer. I have to separate each sheet and then restack them before loading into the tray. Every once in a while two sheets might go through instead of one, but you just reload the sheet that didn't get printed. I thought about dropping it to four stars, but this is a problem with all polyester label material and is minor compared to the quality and durability.

So far so good.I bought these to label bottles for water quality samples. Right now I use the Avery 2" x 4" shipping labels that are not weatherproof. They work well but we have to tape them to make them waterproof. We use two 2" x 6" tape strips to completely cover the label. This is an added expense and requires more time to prepare the bottles for sampling. I printed up one page of labels (10 individual labels) and put them on our sampling bottles. We use a color xerox laser printer for printing labels as we use color on our labels. I then threw the bottles into a cooler filled with ice and water and left them overnight to simulate how we hold our water samples.I checked the labels the next day and they looked perfect. I rubbed my fingers over the labels to see if the ink or label would rub off and the labels look and felt like they did when I printed them out. The water looks to bead off the label like a vinyl sticker. I left the bottles in the cold water with the labels attached for the weekend and will check them out come Monday. I was very impressed though as I did not expect the labels to work so well as they are described as weatherproof.The only issue I had was the labels arrived with some text on all the labels. It almost looked like a water mark of the Avery logo and some text. Amazon took care of the issue so I can not complain about it but just warn those to look at the labels before printing to see if they have any marks on them and if they do get Amazon to refund the purchase price.I will update soon with my findings and with pictures but so far so good.***UPDATE***The labels survived 72 hours in the water with ease. I pulled the bottles out and while they were still wet I tried rubbing the ink off. I could not get the ink off at all. These are the real deal waterproof labels. I did try to remove the ink so I sprayed the labels with acetone and the ink after a few seconds of spraying started to come off. This was just to test the resistance to a known chemical. If you are using these labels around chemicals be mindful of that. I would say that these are the best labels I have used to date.