Onionskin

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Typewritten page of canary onionskin, 1912. Note the translucency in the upper right corner, where the red library stamp on the transverse is visible.

Onionskin or onion skin is a thin, light-weight, strong, often translucent paper. It was usually used with carbon paper for typing duplicates in a typewriter, for permanent records where low bulk was important, or for airmail correspondence.^[1] It typically has a 9 pound basis weight, and may be white or canary colored.

In the typewriter era, onion skin often had a deeply textured cockle finish which allowed for easier erasure of typing mistakes, but other glazed and unglazed finishes were also available then and may be more common today.

Onionskin paper is relatively durable and lightweight due to its high content of cotton fibers. Because of these attributes and its crispness when folding, onionskin paper is one of the best papers to use for toy kites and advanced paper airplanes. Paper airplanes made from onionskin paper tend to fly very well due to its low weight and high integrity once folded.

References

↑ http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/don/dt/dt2375.html

v t e Paper

History

Materials	Wood pulp Fiber crop Papyrus Paper chemicals

Types	Blotting Bond Construction Copy Cotton Crêpe Display Glassine India Kraft Laid Manila Newsprint Oatmeal Onionskin Origami Rag Rice Security Seed Tar Thermal Tissue Tracing Transfer Tree-free Wallpaper Waterproof Wax Wood-free Wove

Specifications	Size Density Units of paper quantity

Production	Papermaking Paper engineering Paper mill Paper machine Calender Sulfite process Kraft process Soda pulping Paper recycling

Industry	List of paper mills In Europe In Canada In Japan In the United States

Issues	Bleaching of wood pulp Environmental impact of paper Paper pollution

Category Commons

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