The Shiny History Of Glitter

Even 30,000 years ago, which is approximately 30,000 years before the invention of glitter glue and glitter slime, human beings were already obsessed with shiny things. We used powdered Mica, a naturally occurring form of silica, to make shiny paint for cave walls. And you thought the 8-year-olds you know had an over-the-top taste in art material.

Not long after, we were using Hematite, a reddish-brown iron crystal, and Galena, a shiny grey lead-based substance, in paints and cosmetics. All this likely before built settlements existed. Shininess has always been king. Or queen.

Speaking of royalty, we now suspect that although the Mayan structures look like unadorned stone, they were originally painted in glittering red, green and grey paints. Meanwhile in Egypt, they were using crushed beetles and green malachite crystal powders for their royal glitter fix.

Rocks and metals were the source of all our glittering needs until the 1930s, when Henry F. Ruschmann, who invented a film stock cutting machine, noticed how workers were using the discarded debris of the machine to decorate their Christmas trees. Film stock is usually a metal crystal based coating on celluloid. Thus modern plastic glitter was born.

Now, 90 years later, we’re all aware of the dangers of micro-plastics, the microscopic debris of all the plastic we use in our daily lives. But the problem is, glitter is manufactured by design to be a micro-plastic, tiny pieces of plastic coated with aluminium for the shine. There is now a move towards biodegradable glitter, which replaces the plastic with an engineered cellulose from eucalyptus trees, but there’s some debate about whether this is any better for the environment than the plastic and PET original.

Hold on though, the real Original glitter is mica, and malachite, and all these simpler, natural minerals which we used for so many millennia to add that extra luster to our lives. Maybe all that royal opulence, now available to all of us for purchase at a new low, low price, need not be plastic. Maybe we all need to be less plastic and more Metal.

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