We do have translucent paper. It's nowhere near transparent, but translucent enough to give you some idea about what's inside. I've seen it used in the packaging for a few products at my local supermarket.

I think it's Glassine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glassine

Is this the paper, i wonder, that was used in old physical photo albums. Every alternate leaf was a translucent / see-through paper that would protect the photo print's surface and ink from getting fused to the previous page.

Glassine has been around forever. Useful for philately!

There are also transparent rolling papers

Celluloid (nitrated cellulose with camphor) is not the only transformation of cellulose into a plastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate dates back to the 19th century; tough enough to be used for films and eyeglass frames.

Production involves some chems: "cellulose [pulp] is reacted with acetic acid and acetic anhydride in the presence of sulfuric acid."

Acetic anhydride is restricted in some countries because it's used in making heroin.

But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.

Great summary of paper akin of TL;DR.

If only AI/LLM can summarize most research papers like this correctly and intuitively I think most people will pay good money for it, I know I would.

The Wall Street Journal recently started putting a 3-bullet-point AI generated summary at the top of each story.