The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BREAKING DOWN THOSE DECORATIVE PARTICLES
Decorative particles help fulfill humankind’s desire for shiny things.
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.
Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precisioncut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (I’m paraphrasing). In homes and malls and schools and synagogues and banks and hospitals and fire stations and hardware stores and breweries and car dealerships, and every kind of office — and outside those places, too — it shines. It glitters. It is glitter.
What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.
Humans, even humans who don’t like glitter, like glitter. We are drawn to shiny things in the same wild way our ancestors were overcome by a compulsion to forage for honey. A theory that has found favor among research psychologists is that our attraction to sparkle is derived from an innate need to seek out freshwater.
Glitter as a touchable product — or more correctly, an assemblage of touchable products (“glitter” is a mass noun; specifically, it is a granular aggregate, like “rice”) — is an invention so recent it’s barely defined. The Oxford English Dictionary principally concerns itself with explaining glitter as an intangible type of sparkly light.
The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we are familiar with today are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey in the 1930s, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extremely small pieces. The specific events that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, all of a sudden, it was simply everywhere.
Most of the glitter that adorns America’s name brand products is made in one of two places: The first is in New Jersey, but the second, however, is also in New Jersey. The first, the rumored farm site of glitter’s invention, refused to answer any of my questions. “We are a very private company,” a representative said via email. The second is Glitterex.
Glitterex was founded in 1963. Babu Shetty, 69, joined the company as president and CEO in 1999, though he had been working to develop some of its glitter products since the 1970s, when he came to the U.S. from Mumbai to earn an advanced degree. His Ph.D. is in polymer science and engineering. He jokes that he fell into the plastic business because it was recommended to Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate.”
The glitter factory is located in a beige business park, a short walk from the office of a company that makes sidewalks for airports and a nut plant. Inside the Glitterex vestibule, a glass display case bursted with glitter-suffused products that I agreed to not describe, even vaguely. Aside from the display, there were scant other hints of the building’s glorious purpose.
That is, until one entered the bottling warehouse itself, which looked like an industrial manufacturing plant colonized by pixies. The concrete floor was finely coated with what appeared to be crushed moonbeams. The forklift winked with shiny crimson flecks. The metal coils of the conveyor belt shone with a rainbow crust. And yet, the space gave the impression of being tidy and well-swept, not unlike a Dust Bowl kitchen if the prairie topsoil had been Technicolor.
My guides through the glitter kingdom were Lauren Dyer, a Glitterex manager, and Jeet Shetty, who works alongside his father. The biggest seller, they told me, is always silver. They unscrewed several jars so I could compare different silvers side-byside: sparkly silver and silver that flashed with the power of a thousand suns.
I met the elder Shetty in a conference room in the front of the office, where, beneath a glittering silhouette-style wall hanging of the pre-9/11 New York City skyline, he breezed through several advanced textbooks’ worth of chemical engineering in an attempt to tell me what glitter was.
“This polyester film” he began, picking up a strip of clear material, about five inches wide, “people might know as mylar. It’s the same polymer as used in a water bottle, so FDA-approved. If you cut this you’d get a clear glitter.” The bulk of Glitterex glitter is made from plastic, though some varieties come from other sources, like aluminum. Clear glitter looks like tiny pieces of a dead jellyfish. “Then,” he said, “we go into the next iteration of a substrate, where the clear film is metalized.” He picked up a shining silver strip of material. “Potato chips bags start with the same polyester film; it’s metalized with aluminum.”
Metalization, he explained, is the process by which aluminum is deposited on both sides of the film. This made sense in theory, but how could aluminum could go from being not on the film to being on the film without at least some Scotch tape? “They evaporate aluminum and deposit it on it,” Babu Shetty said. This made sense in theory, but how could aluminum be evaporated? “It’s a very, very thin layer. They put it in a vacuum chamber, then evaporate the aluminum,” Babu Shetty said. “With heat,” his son added. “What are they evaporating out of it?” I asked. “Aluminum,” Babu Shetty said.
I have no idea how humans figured out how to do that, or why it occurred to them to even try, but it sounds expensive.
If you want to make something a cool color, it is almost always imperative that the color you select is one that human brains can process. The colors of the visible spectrum, arranged in order from longest to shortest wavelength, are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. How do we perceive them? Something about cones in our eyeballs. What do the cones detect? Light waves in lengths between about 400 and 700 nanometers. How long is a nanometer? The width of a human hair is the size of about 80,000 to 100,000 of them. What is the perfect thing to say to shatter my fragile sanity? “Each layer is over 230 nanometers,” Shetty said.
Because red has the longest wavelength, the layers of red iridescent film are the thickest; violet iridescent layers are the thinnest. Shetty began tilting the clear film backward. “That’s the red,” he said, as it flashed red. He continued tilting. “At some point it’ll go to green,” he said, just as the film flashed green, then blue, then violet. He picked up another clear sheet and began to tilt it. This one skipped red and green, starting with a blue flash and then moving to violet, before appearing clear again. “What happens below violet is UV,” he said. “You don’t see it.”
The difference in thickness of the iridescent film strips was imperceptible by touch.
There are other more obvious size differences, of course. Craft glitter is the thickest and least technologically advanced. (To remove it, Shetty recommends soap and water or fabric softener sheets, to combat the plastic’s static cling.) The finest cosmetic glitter is used in products designed for lips.
It’s impossible to re-create the light-catching effect of glitter without using tiny particles of something, which means that if an object looks glittery upon close inspection (a credit card design; an NFL helmet; a jet ski paint job), there are good odds that it contains glitter.
The tiniest glitter Glitterex makes is 50 by 75 microns (a micron is one thousandth of a millimeter). The minimum order size the company will fill is enough to supply sparkle to “half a million bottles” of nail polish by Shetty’s estimation (10 pounds). Prices vary depending on particle size, the formulations and combinations of polymers involved, but at the upper end — which is to say: the smaller end — a 10-pound plastic bag of glitter costs about $1,000. The company offers over 10,000 varieties.
For people who love glitter, there is wonderful news: All the modern plastic glitter that has ever been created is still right here with us. According to Dr. Victoria Miller, a materials science and engineering professor at North Carolina State University, the plastic film from which most glitter is made takes about 1,000 years to completely biodegrade on Earth.
Because each particle is less than five millimeters long, plastic glitter falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s definition of microplastic — a category of material that has lately become a focus of environmental advocacy. (In 2015, for instance, President Barack Obama signed an act banning plastic microbeads from rinse-off cosmetics.) While the research is conclusive that the world’s oceans are a cold stew of man-made microplastics, the effect of their presence is not fully understood. NOAA’s “Ocean Facts” webpage warns that these particles pose “a potential threat to aquatic life,” but states that “not a lot is known about microplastics and their impacts yet.” A more fundamental problem, Miller said, is that, like all plastics, “glitter is a petroleum product. It comes directly from fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are a very finite resource and we’re using them to make completely disposable things.”
In short, Miller was adamant that glitter is “not good” for the environment, but she did not advocate a ban. “I think we’ve got bigger fish to fry,” she said. So: what is glitter? A manipulation of humans’ inherent desire for freshwater. An intangible light effect made physical. Mostly plastic, and often from New Jersey. Disposable by design but, it turns out, not literally disposable. An object in which the inside of a potato chip bag meets the aurora borealis.
I asked Jeet and Babu Shetty to answer the question.
“I would say they’re small decorative particles,” Jeet. “But that’s not really correct because there are other small decorative particles.”
His father’s answer was simpler: “Since we’re a glitter manufacturer, anything we do is now called ‘glitter.’”
So that’s what it is.