The End of Glitter?

Or are we just at the beginning—of a new era of microplastic-free, perfectly-healthy-to-eat sparkle. Tamar Adler reports on glitz to feel good about.

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 Nas X 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.”