Did you know that blue morpho butterflies, one of the most iridescent animals on earth, have only brown pigment in their wings? Or that the single most vibrantly colored living thing is the berry from an African plant called Pollia condensata—which doesn’t have any pigment?
“You’re trying to distract me,” says my husband, to whom I’m helpfully reciting these facts. He’s relentless. He should have been a lawyer. “Tell me you’re not about to fill our house with glitter.”
The delicate thing is that I am. I’m packing away his sewing supplies—he’s an amateur seamster—to make room for boxes and boxes of loose glitter, glittery nail polish, glitter eye shadow, glitter bath bombs, and so on.
Glitter is in the air, both figuratively and, I recently learned, literally—from Lil NasX as a glitter cat at last year’s Met Gala (courtesy of Pat McGrath) to #Mermaidcore, the social media aesthetic that merges sparkle, opalescence, and fins. “Glitter has this emotional play to it,” says Donni Davy, makeup artist for the opulently bedazzled Euphoria. Glitter is transgressive—you don’t wear it to look sexy; you wear it to look cosmic. “Without light, glitter just looks like particles,” Davy says. “But when the light hits, it comes alive.”
My husband’s objection derives from the unfortunate fact that glitter is composed of microplastics—bits of plastic smaller than five millimeters. And microplastics are now found in, among other things, tap water, breast milk, fruit, rain, and antarctic snow. They’ve made their way to locations as far-flung as the Mariana Trench and Mount Everest. The glitter found in much nail polish or eye shadow has historically consisted of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), layered with aluminum and styrene acrylate, and then finely cut into geometric shapes. All the glitter ever made still exists. Remember how in the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier declared that matter can never be destroyed? I think he meant glitter.
In October the European Union, inferring that microplastics shouldn’t be so omnipresent, banned microplastic glitter. By 2027, it will be illegal to put glitter in shower gels and face wash. By 2035, in any makeup at all. How many pounds of microplastics have you licked off your lips in your decades of adulthood? I call Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers. “Microplastics are in our blood, our placentas, our body tissues. They’re everywhere we’ve looked so far,” she says. The sources of our internal microplastics are wide. “Glittery makeup isn’t of any more concern than all other sources of microplastics. But there isn’t any less concern either.”
I search “biodegradable glitter” and discover that in recent years, there’s been glitter made from the cellulose of eucalyptus trees and wood pulp—materials that are used in some biodegradable plastic bags. According to a number of researchers, however, these “biodegradable” glitters are only theoretically biodegradable: They only decompose in particular conditions—specifically, in industrial composters. Which would mean coming home from a night out and scraping one’s makeup off into a compost bucket whose contents will be appropriatelyprocessed.
But then I have an epiphany! Remember edible glitter, that modish ingredient which sparkled atop lattes and pizza circa 2017? Per instructions on Craftsuprint.com, I combine kosher salt with red food coloring and bake it at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, using the precious time to find Vaseline—which should turn my homemade glitter into lip gloss. I eagerly retrieve my baking sheet. I grant that my salt is Diamond Crystal Kosher and my red food coloring is made of organic beets, but what I end up with is not sparkly at all. I apply it as lip gloss and look like I have smallpox.
Might professionally made edible glitter offer more promise? Recently, a company named Fancy Sprinkles has started making FDA-approved edible glitter out of mica—a group of 37 silicate minerals found in granite and other rocks—dextrose, rice protein, and food dyes. When my samples of Fancy Sprinkles arrive, I bake a batch of corn muffins and blanket them in glitter. Corn muffins have never been so golden! I pour Champagne Rose Gold Fancy Sprinkles into my seltzer and cheers to my success.
But my cheers were premature. What I want is sparkly makeup, not muffins. Attempts to suspend Fancy Sprinkles in Vaseline are only nominally more successful than my efforts with salt. I can’t achieve anything like Euphoria’s glittery tears. Perhaps I’ve been doing needless work. Maybe cosmetics companies have already figured this out. Donni Davy’s exquisite line, Half Magic, hasn’t yet been reformulated to meet EU regulations—though she says she’s excited by the challenge. “It’s going to push innovation. It’s a necessary and ultimately good thing.” Davy sends me a synthetic-mica-based Half Magic Glitterpuck, a shimmery powder, which has admirable sparkle and much more staying power than my homemade attempts.
I learn from James Newhouse, head formulator for the beauty brand Chantecaille, that the company, founded in 1998, has never used microplastic glitter. He sends me a lipstick that twinkles with microscopic gold, even once applied. I feel like Beyoncé. Newhouse, a chemist by training, explains that its glitter comes from borosilicate pearl pigment, while the trio of shadows in Chantecaille’s spring 2024 collection derive their sparkle from mica from the Responsible Mica Initiative. (Though mica is a naturally occurring substance, mica mining has historically been plagued with humanitarian violations, mostly stemming from illegal child labor.) I’m not a regular makeup wearer, and my avant-garde assays with Chantecaille’s glittery eye shadows elicit a shrill scream from my son.
