Write About Everything

It’s old. Very, very old.

I assumed that glitter was invented a while within the Victorian era, most likely for the only function of gaudying-up sentimental greeting cards. But glitter is much older than I ever guessed.

A while round forty,000 B.C., historical humans started dusting sparkly crushed minerals over their cave paintings. As early because the sixth century A.D., Mayans had been adding glitter made of mica to their temple partitions, based on National Geographic. And in 2010, the BBC reported that reflective material was discovered blended in with what’s believed to be the residue of fifty,000-year-old Neanderthal cosmetics.

It’s not made of metal.

Aluminum, maybe tin: That’s what I thought glitter was made of. Nope. Modern glitter was invented in 1934 in New Jersey, of all places, when American machinist Henry Ruschmann figured out a technique to grind plastic into glitter. Eventually the raw material evolved into polyester film layered with coloring and reflective materials “fed through a rotary knife cutting system … kind of a combination of a paper shredder and a wood chipper,” based on glitter manufacturer Joe Coburn. Earlier than that, glitter was made of glass. Not something you’d wish to eat.

It’s everywhere.

Tons of glitter are produced yearly (actually, tons). There are 20,000 types of glitter available from pioneer glitter-makers Meadowbrook Inventions alone, starting from the run-of-the-mill craft glitter you bear in mind from kindergarten to “particular effects” glitter for industrial applications. It can be as positive as dust or as chunky as confetti. As glitter manufacturer Coburn remarked on Reddit in 2014, an order of “2 tons a month is a really small measurement

You’ll be able to see a glitter-making machine in action here — it’s disturbingly environment friendly at reducing thin sheets of polyester film into gleaming little grains. Glitter isn’t biodegradable and most people don’t recycle it. So it’s not going anywhere.

You’ll be able to eat it.

Hold on! You’ll be able to’t eat just any glitter. It has to be edible glitter, a hip new condiment that gained fame on Instagram in 2017. Since the first twinkling images showed up, it’s made an appearance on everything from donuts to bagels to pizza.

In the interest of great academic research, I consider it’s essential that I investigate and devour edible glitter. What’s it made of? When was it invented? Most essential of all, what would happen if someone baked it right into a cake and ate it?