Connect
To Top

One of Our Favorite Beauty Trends is Actually Harming the Environment

If you love glitter, you might be surprised to find out your favorite beauty trend is damaging our environment.

This season, glitter is trending big time. You’ve been seeing it used in many ways such as glitter eyeshadows, eye liners, nail polishes, lip sticks and yes, even tongues! But scientists are now saying that this mega trend should be banned because it is harming the environment.

This might surprise you because who would have known that your favorite trend for the holiday season might be polluting and damaging the environment! How and why is this even possible?  Well, scientists are saying glitter is similar to microbeads that pollute the ocean and cause harm to living organisms.  They are harmful because they don’t break down and decompose. Animals that live in the ocean eat microbeads as they can’t distinguish them from real food. Similarly, animals often see glitter fragments as food and ingest these fragments. Glitter microplastics are very minute in size. They are less than 0.2 inches long and because of this, marine animals mistake them for something edible.

In addition, these microplastics are harmful to us as well!  They are so small they aren’t filtered out in our water treatment centers and they can end up in our drinking water!  So, these microplastics are not good for both man and animals!

And if microplastics affect the smallest organisms such as plankton in the oceans, there is a trickle-down effect that will cause damage to other animals in the food chain.  So, even though a larger organism is not directly affected by ingesting glitter, it will be affected indirectly because of the food chain.

And did you know that already eight million tons of plastic end up in our oceans each year?  So, if your favorite beauty trend right now is glitter, you might want to reconsider this for the sake of our environment. We love this current trend too, but we have to ask the question, “Beauty at what price?”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Is Your Body Scrub Harming the Environment?

  • Save

More in Beauty

Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap