What giclée means, and what it doesn't

The word is French and it was invented for a sales pitch. A printmaker called Jack Duganne needed something to put on a label in 1991 that did not say "inkjet", and took gicler, to squirt.

That is the entire history. There is no standards body, no certification, nobody checking. Anyone can run a file through an office printer onto copy paper and write giclée on the invoice, and no rule has been broken.

Which does not mean the word is worthless. It usually signals that somebody was trying. It just means the word is not the thing you should be asking about.

What actually decides whether a print lasts

Three things, and none of them is the label.

**The ink.** Dye inks are bright and cheap and fade, sometimes visibly inside five years on a sunny wall. Pigment inks are ground solids suspended in liquid, and they hold for decades. This is the single biggest difference between a print that ages and a poster that dies.

**The paper.** Cheap paper is wood pulp and contains acid, which slowly turns it yellow and brittle from the inside. Cotton fibre paper has none, which is why it is what museums use for anything meant to stay. Weight matters as well, because thin paper cockles inside a frame. Anything at 200 gsm or more feels like a print rather than a page.

**The file.** A print can only be as good as what was scanned. Nothing in the printing stage recovers detail the original capture never had, which is the reason some prints look soft at large sizes and no amount of giclée on the label fixes it.

The questions worth asking a seller

Pigment or dye ink. If they do not know, that is your answer.

What the paper is. You want to hear cotton, or acid-free, and a weight in grams.

How many are being printed. An edition means something only if the number is fixed and stated.

What happens if it arrives damaged. A seller who prints properly is not nervous about this question.

None of those questions contains the word giclée, and together they tell you more than the word ever could.

What we use, so you can compare

Our prints go on 100% acid-free cotton fibre paper at 270 gsm, through a twelve-ink system, which is what gives the colour range and the detail in the dark areas where cheaper printers go muddy.

The colour is rated to hold for around 200 years away from direct sunlight and moisture. That second half is not fine print, it is the actual condition, and it is why there is a whole article about light and damp.

Every print ships with a Certificate of Authenticity, and the limited editions are numbered against a run that gets smaller as the format gets bigger: 250 at the smallest size, 50 at the largest.

So is a giclée print worth more than a poster

Yes, and not because of the word.

A poster is printed in tens of thousands on paper meant to last a few years, from a file sized for that job. A print like the ones described above is a different object that happens to share a shape.

You can tell them apart by hand, in the dark, by the weight and the texture of the paper. That is the part the label was trying to gesture at, badly, since 1991.

See what is in the shop, or read what separates an original from a print.