I can't imagine a hell worse then working in a glitter factory. You know that stuff has to be so deeply ingrained in everything you own there is no escaping it.
My dad worked in the milk powder plant of a dairy company and his entire car was contaminated with milk powder from his clothes and hair (with the obvious side-effect of milk contamination) - the only vehicle I've ever been in where I got "car sick" from just getting into the car, before the engine even started. Glitter's got to be just as pervasive - though fortunately probably smells better...
You come home and sit down on the couch. Your butt was covered in glitter. You try to rub your eyes. There's glitter under your fingernails. Ouch. You accidentally cut a gash into your finger. Only glitter pours out of the wound. You call your spouse for help and grab their hand. They dissolve into a pile of glitter. You look at your children carefully, their skin has a shimmer to it. They were always made of glitter. You look at your whole life. Only glitter. You wake up. You're still in the glitter factory.
Even if it isn't anything nefarious I can pretty much guarantee that if they "don't want people to know it's glitter", then it is either bad for consumers, the environment, or both.
You can't get much more nefarious than damaging health and ecosystems. "Don't want people to know it's glitter" means it's something people interact with and are aware of, so it wouldn't make sense for it to be spy taggers or something you're not supposed to encounter or know of at all.
I wonder if Glitter-X ever expanded out into mica based glitter? That stuff is in absolutely everything nowadays. Particularly all manner of paints and cosmetics, even processed food. I could imagine that they wouldn't want that being in the press, as it's my understanding that's it's still primarily being mined in third world countries. By children. Child slaves. Because they're the only ones small enough to fit into the narrow passageways of the mines. Which regularly collapse. Mica is pretty much up there with the bulk of the chocolate industry in terms of knowingly and primarily relying on child slavery to source their product.
I taught at a children’s museum. We called glitter “craft herpes “. Because you can’t get rid of all of it. Later in life I repaired paint jobs at a GM plant. Metallic flake paints were the hardest to repair. Glitter minus the plastic was the flake. I’m retired now and living in Nova Scotia. Mica is everywhere here. The beach, in gravel. Environmental artists use mica flakes instead of glitter. I know some potters that do. Get rid of the stuff. It’s just bad news.
My grandpa lived near Coos Bay, Oregon and he had a hobby of collecting interesting trash that washed ashore (My favorite was his collection of old glass floaters that broke away from fishing nets and buoys and floated over from Japan). There's actually a small art industry in the area making art from the plastics and debris that wash up on the beach.
I once convinced a girl in high school that glitter was an asexually reproducing organism and that’s why we couldn’t get it out of the theater stage wings.
Wouldn't that make some sense? Glitter would absorb the microwave radiation and heat up, allowing a more uniform heat distribution. But I think that carbon fibres might be working just as well while being less conspicuous. Maybe in the packaging, though? The truth is out there.
I don't know if anyone will get this... In the past, people looked to some eagle-eyed people older than expected from today's experience with people. Why? What do the "kems" from packaging, rugs, etc do to systemic "harmones"? Is it an unintended consiquence, or not. Hopefully we can put the *toothpaste* back in the tube.
About 20 years ago I saw a segment on some show about Nielsen-Massey (the vanilla extract company). They were showing the process and when asked were very cagey about what happens to the seeds after all the flavor is extracted. Someone researched and it turns out their biggest customer for that was Breyers. Their Vanilla Bean ice cream is made with extract for flavor and the flavorless seeds we all see are thrown in for looks and to make people believe they are getting something special.
Yep, I did a self- blind taste challenge years ago. Braums, Beyers, and Blue Bell. Breyers was the most TASTELESS! Blue Bell was the BEST!!!! Each brand was labeled as the same flavor. Oh, yes, it was a blind test because somebody assisted me. A blindfold was used, they scooped up a small amount, and my mouth was rinsed after each taste.
So, I was in the flooring industry for 20 years and I have been involved in filing claims against product manufacturers for failures several times. I can tell you with 100% certainty that all adhesive manufacturers add glitter to their products so they can positively identify which product was used. Each product has a different glitter composition so that under a microscope it would be easy to identify who was the manufacturer and to ensure the recommended adhesive was used for the application. If you think about the amount of adhesives used I could easily see 500 tons of glitter being used for this purpose.
@@arenomusic/ more or less. The manufacturer will have custom unique blends for each customer, and for each use case the customer needs which can be positively identified as a DNA like ingredient
There are two problems with this theory. First is that it isn't even a little bit secret that the adhesives are tagged, the manufacturers want you to know that they will be able to tell if you used the right one or not. And second, the amount of glitter in a pail of glue is really small, I really can't see them using nearly as much as automotive paint.
If you want Earth friendly alternatives to Glitter: 1. Mica Powder, as mentioned in the video. Mica is naturally occurring, and they add pigments to give them bold, beautiful colors. Mica is most commonly used in Makeup, so it's body safe as well. There are plenty of sustainably and ethically sourced mica products. 2. Eucalyptus Pulp Fibers. BioGlitz, one of the upcomming biodegradable glitter manufacturers, uses exclusively Eucalyptus Pulp Fibers to create their shine. Like Mica, they add pigments for color. BioGlitz is also ethically AND sustainably sourced, + they're accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council. FDA approved and GMO absent. BioGlitz is not the only biodegradable eucalyptus manufacturer though, check out your options!! Keep in mind though: Make sure the product is ethically and sustainably sourced before you can confidently call it Eco-Friendly. While these are better alternatives to plastic and aluminum glitter, Mica is not naturally renewable and Eucalyptus takes 6 to 8 years to fully grow into a viable tree for pulp fiber extraction. Use your biodegradable glitter with pride, but still be wise with it like you would regular glitter. Do your research and find out what works for you lovelies.
Back in the 80s, I knew an old man who was a great fisherman. I was always asking him to tell me his secrets. He finally did. Glitter. He dipped all his baits and tackle in it. The water would be full of sparkling toxic plastic, and the fish thought it was a feeding frenzy. I never used his secret.
I've never considered trying that but the tiny scales of small fish when being eaten in a feeding frenzy does look exactly like a tiny glitter bomb going off. Now I gotta invent biodegradable glitter lure dip dammit.
I have another theory. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing. For the glittery anti-counterfeit marks and holograms (iridescence) they put on money. I'd imagine that if those things are made slightly wrong, it could be easily spotted by the Secret Service. They could be the biggest customer not in terms of weight, but perhaps in terms of cost, because of difficulty to manufacture and strict tolerances.
This make a lot of sense. 🤔The *US Treasury* could have a contract to have a secret glitter formulated exclusively for their use. They would not want anyone to know the formula to thwart counterfeiters, and the contract would specify that not only the formula but themselves as well must remain a secret. 🤫
This is what I was going to comment..some kind of passport or cash security feature, it’s the only thing I can think of that they would want to keep quiet.
@@Admiralty86 the other side of my brain says that if it was for something so critical the US gov would have their own glitter factory….or the firm would never be allowed to tell people there is a big important customer they can’t tell you about if it was for this purpose 🤷🏻♂️😂
In Brazil, in the week after the carnival, when everyone is back to their boring lives, and at work, in a multinational company, for that stressful budget meeting, the president of the company is raging complaints all around, but then in that moment, that sweet moment, you see some glitter shining somewhere around his face and you remember: he is also just a human being. And no matter how many showers you take after the carnival. The glitter is now part of you, in a symbiotic relationship, to remind you, during many days to come, about those mistakes you want to forget
An oratory trick my mum taught me. If you are to speak in front of "important people" and it makes you anxious just remind yourself: each and every one of them woke up, brushed their teeth and groggily shuffled into their kitchen then set a pot of coffee before frying some eggs. Probably in their PJs or underwear.
@@mason4354 i don't sleep. I close my eyes and flow into alternate dimensions and universes. I spend the night roaming those strange lands and encountering different versions of me among other colourful characters... Who would willingly want to miss out on this?
I just remember elementary school and all the girls had glitter in their hairline. I always thought that was such a crazy thing that girls did, and I remember spending all afternoon trying to figure out how to remove glitter from someone's hairline (Dunk head under water and then agitate their scalp? Lice comb? Straight-up shaving their head and starting over??)
Several years ago I was making my new granddaughter a fuzzy blanket. Hello Kitty with pink and white snuggly soft micro fleece. If you have ever cut this super sparkling microfleece you know a super fine dust is created as your cutting it into the size you need. I was recovering from my 5th surgery that year and I was convalescening in bed while I cut my fabric pieces, happy as I could be and it was really cold outside so i was snuggled with my dogs and my project. Where it gets very funny is that my husband is a detective Sargent in a law enforcement agency. He worked night that year. He leaned in to kiss me goodbye and glittery sparkly dust stuck to him like mosquitoes drawing blood. Well he got to work and it was very clearly seen all over his clothing under UV light. He lit up like Christmas tree. The laughter I heard over the phone as he told me over the phone what happened , i could hardly hear him speaking because his brothers in blue were laughing so hard.
Aww, that's cute. You know what's crazy? Up to 40% of police personnel have uniforms and equipment contaminated by glitter. Look it up yourself! Google "40% cops"
I work for a quartz manufacturer, and I can tell you for sure we do not use glitter. When we want quartz to sparkle we use specially treated chunks of glass. That being said, we manufactured in the US. The majority of quartz is made over seas, so it's possible those practices are different.
Well, that is kinda glitter but probably not the kind they mean here. But yeah, the plastic part seems like a stupid idea to use, I could see some company using aluminum for the job but that would also just be kinda glitter. I don't really see why this would be a secret anyways, just like with paint so I don't think this would be it.
Thats because you guys are legit. DEFINITELY can see the Chinese industry pulling that crap. _AND_ it would make perfect sense why an American company would want to keep something like that secret
All I know is that many years I let a neighbor use my house for a baby shower. Now… over a decade later I am STILL finding glitter in plants, shoe bottoms, everywhere. You can’t get it out, ever, I swear the little glitter things are alive and breed. 😊
@@candlestyx8517Not even close. I clean party venues, the confetti & tinsel you can get in one cleaning. But glitter & shimmers… the lounge will never be free of.
The most plausible explanation I can think of for the spokesperson not wanting to reveal their biggest customer is they don't want to give that away to their competitors.
I think the countertops idea is probably spot on. I recall watching a video a couple of years ago about the construction of an underground train station in London. Because the station was so far underground no natural light entered it and they were concerned about it looking drab and depressing. So they mixed glitter into the concrete they used to construct the internal walls. Not so it would be sparkly but just enough so that it reflected a small amount of light and therefore didn't appear matte and drab. So I imagine that glitter is used fairly often in construction. And because of the "natural" appearance of stone countertops they probably wouldn't want people knowing there is something incredibly unnatural in them.
What's bizarre to me is that plastic straws and grocery bags that nearly always end up in the landfill were banned in Canada before something that nearly always ends up as litter and that practically cannot be removed from the environment.
What's crazier is that a single piece of steak, just one piece, produces as much carbon pollution as an entire month worth of household plastic waste. One single piece of steak. And yet governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you not to use straws, while subsidising the animal agriculture industries to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. Total hypocrisy. Oh, and that also means that anyone who pretends to care about climate change / the environment and still eats meat is nothing more than a virtue signalling hypocrite. Fact.
I used to work for this a makeup company. They had this ugly Grey powder that was literal diamond powder worth about 5k per kilo. It was used so a company could legally say they use diamonds in their products. What did they use to make it LOOK like shimmery diamonds? Glitter So I totally believe the quartz theory
Microplastics are everywhere. We should not be making more. I'm guessing it ends up in food and toothpaste. That would not be something we would expect, and definitely not be something they would want us to know.
"diamond powder" So literally just carbon powder.. graphite powder.. ground up pencils. People with too much money on their hands are supremely gullible and stupid. At least when it comes to expensive stuff.
@@ericalbers4867 No! diamond powder is not graphite. Small diamonds are actually easy to manufacture, and if cartels didn't control the supply in South Africa, natural diamonds would be very cheap, they're so plentiful. So it's not people with "too much money", it's all of us who put a diamond ring on our spouse's fingers, who are the suckers. Stop looking your nose down any other group of people and start questioning what you do that is gullible and stupid.
The military rumor has been flying around the tabletop gaming world for ages. Metallic model paints, which use glitter, end up with a shortage every time there's a new conflict. Even the lack of components for making white metal causing gaming companies to switch to resin and plastic right after the invasion of Iraq. I'd always heard the story that every X number of years, our stealth fighters needed to be repainted using paint with glitter, but chaff makes just as much sense. Side note, the invasion of Ukraine caused an immediate glitter shortage for model paints. Large companies like Games Workshop were out for months.
@@lunacouer I've never looked into it. And again, it's all rumor and conjecture. But one would also have to factor in whether or not smaller model paint manufacturers are further down the pecking order compared to gigantic craft companies selling standard glitter. I'm not sure if they'd correlate.
Chessex, a company that manufactures polyhedral dice sets, has a line of dice called Chessex Borealis. They use extremely fine glitter to give them this particular sheen. Several years ago, they were forced to change the glitter in the dice because the US Treasury started using that particular glitter in US currency. That particular glitter is so proprietary that no other dice maker in the world has been able to exactly duplicate Old Glitter Chessex Borealis, though every dice maker from hobbyists to huge manufacturing plants the world over has tried. So make of that what you will.
@@charlesmurray3255 I doubt it would make the running--they don't make that much paper money, & the glitter doesn't form a large enough component of it to make that big of a detail. No, I don't think U.S money would be the biggest buyer. If there was a central world printer of currency, that might work as a theory, but each nation prints their own money.
Boat paint is often ablative meaning it’s meant to wear off to prevent things from growing on it. More or less they are slowly dumping glitter into the water to protect the boats.
Exactly what i thought, especially all the sand and other shit in the water that slowly erodes at the paint, people forget that salt water can be pretty abrasive, 100% they dont wanna talk about it because it would be like opening the pandoras box of glitter ocean pollution
@@excalibur2038 WRONG. The problem isn't glitter, bud; you're barking up the wrong tree. Think long and hard now: what is a fiberglass hull made of? What is gel coat? But lets look beyond boats for a moment; let's look at YOUR lifestyle. When you purchase groceries, what do you carry you food out in? Paper bags maybe? More commonly a plastic bag, reusable or otherwise, right? And what does the vast majority of food come packaged in? Plastic, right? You drive a car, right? Look at your seats. Are they covered in leather, or is it plastic? What do you think is under the fabric? Look up, what do you see? It ain't cotton! The dash board - what's that? The radio? Shift knob? Compartment covers? Carpet? Trim? You see plastic everywhere you look, right? Look at your car's paint. Is it still glossy? Or has the PLASTIC clear coat started to wear off? Or has is worn away entirely? And those tires - my oh my, those tires - you drive tens of thousands of miles on those things, and they wear down. Yeah... where do you think all that goes? You go to McDonalds, order a soda. Some places you'll get a paper straw because people didn't like seeing pictures of a turtle with a straw up its nose. But you still get a PLASTIC lid. Your clothes. What are they made of? And what do you pull off your dryer's lint filter? Yeah, lots of plastic there. How much plastic fiber from your clothes got flushed down the drain by the washing machine? It all has to go somewhere. A lot of your personal plastic waste ends up in the landfill, where it's mostly sequestered. But not all of it. A lot of your plastic ends up in the water, where it slowly breaks down into tiny pieces. Sometimes that water is in the ocean. And sometimes, that water is your drinking water. Yes, you may well be drinking some of your own plastic pollution! Boats are an insignificant source of plastic pollution in the ocean, and your personal consumption is far, far more impactful.
@@warpedweirdo bro i dont need you to explain to me how much plastic we use in society, everyone knows this, i was talking about who the glitter companies sell too and why they wouldn't want people too know
Anti-fouling paint (prevents growth of algae and barnacles) is based on copper and is pretty nasty stuff (it has to be to prevent stuff from growing on it). It's subject to strict regulations when stripping it off (before applying new paint). If large amounts of it came off in the water, that would defeat the purpose. And there's no need to decorate it with glitter since it's below the waterline (the waterline you see on boats and ships delineates the boundary between regular not-so-toxic decorative paint, and toxic anti-fouling paint).
Yeah flake is flake. Flake is big and looks like glitter. But the "metallic" paints are also just a finer glitter added to the paint. My current vehicle I would swear is a base coat/cream coat, but if you look close you can find the occasional glitter sparkle in there. Maybe 10 sparkles per inch. You can even see it if you aren't looking under a magnifier. Why would they add it if you can't see it?
I just bought some little pots of body glitter at Dragon Con that isn’t plastic-it’s eucalyptus fiber! So far I love Uniglitter’s “bio glitter.” There are far fewer color options, of course, but it feels good on your skin and looks good!
Hey, they admitted to being a stripper so why not own up to attending a sex fetish convention. Isn't discussing body glitter the same as saying "I am a stripper"?
I worked for a countertop manufacturer, and the majority of what they used for the iridescent and glitter effect was actually ground seashells from mussels other things. That was just one company though.
Countertop theory does make sense, as I feel that a lot of upper middle class suburbanites splurge on them because its supposed to be made of "rare and exotic pretty rocks" and if the customers were aware that the shine was mostly caused by glitter, they'd feel like they were getting ripped off by the price tag.
My brother in law got very angry with me when I told him that his 'quartz' counter tops where a composite and not '100% solid quartz' like the salesman told him.
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
I would suspect that consumer glitter purchases would vastly outweigh the amount of glitter that could be in quartz countertops. The government, and especially the DoD would make sense to me. There are a few things you can do with glitter that most people probably wouldn’t expect and they seem to be things the DoD would want to use it for.
That sounds unlikely, who would get high on aluminum and plastic? I could see some cartel cutting their cocaine with it though (the tiniest micro glitter) but I don't think they would inform the company that is what they are doing in that case.
I remember the day I found out that there was such a job as a “forensic glitterologist.” It was on an older episode of forensic files. Homes boy had every single size, shape, color, etc. of glitter basically ever, and his job was to like ide tidy glitter found at crime scenes. I was dying I was like this man is my spirit animal.
My first thought was chaff. Any time there's a bunch of money going toward something and people can't talk about what it is I feel like it's usually something to do with the military. And it definitely checks the box as far as the glitter company not wanting to talk about it. Glitter is often associated with art, creativity, and fun. I can imagine that people might be upset to know that the glitter they are using for their arts and crafts is also used in a military plane that can kill people. It's probably not good PR for the glitter company.
Our aircraft carriers can be huuuge, like the size of a small town. Not sure how sparkly they are, I never paid attention when I was visiting before, but I will if I get to in the future. Anyway, all those vehicles, missiles, satellites, and even our officers' uniforms have sparkly bands around their hats, sleeve cuffs, and collars. The marble counters, award cases, memorials, and flooring in and around all our military monuments, gravestones, and other structures...
Quartz and granite for decoration is most plausible but get a feeling it will be a military purpose key national security assets need multiple suppliers so could well be they produce "glitter" and sell it as the militaries secret source for chaff. I don't think people understand that wars are fought by disruption of supply chains mainly China would know where US military supplies are made and these would be primary targets at outset of war. If things are obscured it's generally the military industrial complex.
My initial thought was "chaff", which is released from airborne vehicles to confuse the radar of attackers. However, I looked it up, and, though it used to be particles of foil, modern chaff is made of glass fibres. Dang. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)#Modern_chaff
My first thought is cosmetics. There's lots of shimmering 'glow' makeup out there. I'm not sure if the microbead legislation would prevent their use, but as you pointed out, maybe it's illegally included (unlikely, considering if exposed it could bankrupt the companies) or more likely, it's exported to countries that don't have these environmental protections. If it is indeed something used for defense, the security clearance requirements mean that if something - no matter how mundane - is classified as a secret, it's a federal offense to disclose the information and it's not a good idea to even tiptoe around it - especially to the New York Times. At a minimum it could mean losing their juicy government contract and being banned from future ones. She mentioned she couldn't even mention the industry involved, which could lead one to believe it's an industry controlled by a handful of commercial interests and would therefore 'out' those individual companies. Many companies have disclosure agreements with their suppliers to prevent industrial espionage. Given the fact that glitter has so many niche uses, I assume some of those companies would prefer their competitors not know who their supplier is, especially if that supplier is manufacturing a proprietary formula.
makeup here doesnt exactly make sense, since its usage isnt exactly a secret (nail polish, balm, etc). defence makes sense, but again, cant see how it protects the integrity of the product to know otherwise.
There definitely is a lot of glitter used in the cosmetics industry, but based on my own experience, I would say the majority of “shimmery” products use mica - supposedly. At least that’s what’s on the ingredient list. 👀👀 Also, related fun fact/life tip, if you are in a situation where you want to put glitter on your face, do not use regular glitter - the glittery stuff marketed as makeup is supposed to be “cosmetics grade”, meaning the edges of the glitter pieces are less sharp. Regular glitter can scratch your corneas.
ITS CHAFF for distracting anti-aircraft missiles - lets be real - that's what it is I "know" this cos some boat flairs have radar reflector in them to help them find you and that is glitter
@JosephTheRocker makeup does actually make sense. There's been a been informative push about how dangerous it is to have glitter used in makeup that goes around your eyes. Certain shapes and thicknesses can cut your cornea and leave you permanently blind, or cause infections, or just leave partial blindness. So now, something called "eye safe" glitter is being used, but if you ask experts (ophthalmologists), NO glitter is safe. Mica is what is being said to be mostly used, but with some formulas you can still see micro glitter in them, and it's not being advertised as such. It's a whole big thing (especially when you also bring in ethically sourced/synthetic mica, but that's a whole other topic). I haven't even touched on glitter in lipstick and how "safe" that is to ingest. Or how it's even used in some skincare. So yeah, beauty is an industry that brings in billions every year, worldwide, and it impacts every person on humanity's totem pole.
Seriously, it seems silly, but it is actually important to use a respirator when working with fine grained glitter. Not so much the chunky craft stuff, but the kind that is used for mix-ins for various paints and epoxy materials is a health hazard. It can get airborne and cause all sorts of issues with prolonged exposure. This is also true of sanding practically any material. It seems like overkill, but the health risks are finally getting noticed, and the few studies on the matter that have come out are kinda terrifying. It is too fine for a simple dust mask, you need a legit well-fitted mask to capture that stuff.
I asked an AI chatbot about this on a lark, and its answer was the cosmetics industry. It made absolute sense to me. Small enough glitter would give a luster without being discernable as glitter, and it would definitely benefit companies to keep it a secret. It has the same problem as toothpaste, being that it would be illegal, so it's pretty shaky.
Thats not a secret everyone knows that. It has to do with military I just watched a documentary on glitter called "the end lf glitter conspiracy" by CHUPPL Can't believe they risked their lives to collect data from the sites
@@audiodead7302hundreds or thousands of years from now archaeologists are going to dig up so many glittery remains that they will be convinced there was an entire culture/civilization of "exotic dancers". LOL! 😂😂😂
*worse than That's debatable. On the one hand, glitter is plastic and metal, maybe some germs. On the other, cigarettes include thousands of toxic chemicals and particulates. Vaping is basically the same as inhaling glitter, what with its micro-shrapnel.
I remember the case of a kid who accidentally inhaled glitter and had lots of tiny flakes lodged in his lungs. The poor guy agonized for a month and there was nothing that the doctors could do, except try to ease his pain and wait for a miracle. I thought Joe would talk about stuff like that in this video.
It's definitely gel coat/marine paint. Companies that produce this type of paint are incredibly secretive about there formulations and the markup charged for metallic and pearlescent pigments is truly insane.
My thinking on what she said is that the industry is supposed to be producing a high quality product and instead is using a cheap addition or alternative, marine paint doesn’t make sense for that, because your not going to think that the paint isn’t high quality because it has glitter, but quarts is a high quality material, so quarts makes a lot of sense
@@jgulner there is a lot more larger boats, yacht and ships hell the cruise ship market alone might cover a significant part of the automotive industry in terms of paint but yeah not sure they would fit the bill for keeping it secret i'm more on the chaff or quarts cruise
I used to be a custodian that had, among my other duties, to clean some children's classrooms. I always dreaded when they would use glitter. It never failed, I would be finding glitter everywhere for weeks after cleaning glitter from the kids classrooms. One time I finished up the night covered in glitter. My coworkers laughed their asses off, and I started to describe it as looking like I was mauled by a stripper.
Honestly what makes the most sense to me is paper currency. i cant see a more practical use of the product with an equally important emphasis on obscurity. In that interview, that person was totally comfortable talking about how there's one company who buys a majority of the glitter, and will give away all the info but the buyer themself. the US govt. makes sense here.
Don't know about the US but I had a friend who is working in the federal printing office. He can talk briefly about the security implemented in currency but obviously can't say what exactly is used, because it's classified government data. But I think this is the most plausible answer, sure everyone knows that there IS security build into it. But that's about it. Same for nuclear warheads. Everyone knows (theoretically) how it works but if you are involved (even in the slightest) in the process, you better keep your mouth shut, because the company will loose the contract. And you'll propably go to prison for treason.
This makes sense to me. Even North Korean super notes can be identified as fake somehow, might one certain type of glitter in the paper be one of the distinguishing factors?
This is what i was thinking, too. The spakly denomination on each and every bill printed would certainly use a large amount of glitter. It would have to be very specificly manufactured and specifications kept very secret.
In 2011 the answer was: New York City sidewalks. I had a room-mate who was a member of the MIT media lab who attended a talk on glitter in fabrication and partied with the speaker who let this gem slip. Why? It functions as a flexible aggregate that adds tensile strength and increases heat disapation to inhibit cracking.
I remember the Micro Beads thing not that long ago. I actually got some when my mother mistook this face scrubber stuff as hand lotion. It felt really gritty. It was loaded with micro plastics and banned a little later. This crap was just being washed down the drain. It makes you wonder what the heck they were thinking. Well, they were thinking of profits and not of responsibility.
Yea that was some sick lapse of judgement from their part. They probably poisoned people they loved for profit. The worst thing I heard in this episode is the glitter in animal food. Just use fluorescent dyes. Not nearly as damaging as aluminum straight into the stomach.
I loved that stuff, but I always assumed it was something biodegradable. Like they did some process on the soap which caused it to harden, then crushed it up and put it in the liquid soap. When I learned it was micro-plastics I felt insanely guilty. That's what I get for trusting corporations to not put dangerous crap in their products. I also live in the country, and have a septic field. I'm curious if there's just a thin slab of melted plastic under the ground in my back yard. heh... I mean at least it's not choking fishies.
@@ItsJustMe0585They advertised it as biodegradable. It was one of those technically correct things. Those microbeads were made out of a biopolymer. Plastic made out of plants. That doesn't really make it much different than all the other plastics though. And it's degradable, sure it degrades into much more toxic compounds, that "turn the frogs gay". Therefore "biodegradable TM".
My theory: Her being so secretive about it has a few thousand people talking about it and the company that she works for! Unexpectedly GREAT video Joe!
I worked for a company that made "engineered quartz" countertops. LG Hausey to be specific and everything about the process was very hush so I could def see that. Glitter was def a huge part of the mold especially for the darker countertops. They were marketed as engineered quartz and maybe it was obvious to me because I worked most aspects of the process but it was definitely noticable that they were little pieces of glitter and not real mica or w/e but I could def see why they wouldn't want it getting out to the customers since it might make the product seem "cheap".
@@kathleenyes-cp2uf You can tell engineered quartz from real granite or marble countertops by looking at the relfection. If you see lots of pores and small cracks its likely real granite or stone (which is why ur suppose to reseal them every once in a while to avoid mold etc) while EQ will be almost completely smooth and doesnt ever require sealing.
@@rdlinatlmanufactured "quartz" counters are also very susceptible to heat. Whereas granite can basically handle anything. (I think I read somewhere that it can get stains and scorch marks but it doesn't hurt the integrity of the stone anyway. And I never had any problems putting hot pans on real granite.)
Chaff was the first thing that came to mind. A single contractor will get credit as being "the" supplier of a weapon/countermeasures system, even if all they do is final assembly of sub components. For example, there's at least a couple dozen suppliers contracted by Electric Boat, who then does final assembly of certain military watercraft, but EB is the listed as the sole supplier.
It’s not chaff. It’s way too small to scatter radar waves (aka ~10cm wavelength for guidance, meters for search radar). Maximum scattering occurs with stuff around the same size as the wavelength. For things less than the size of the wavelength, they are invisible.
*I WAS ONCE ON MDMA* on a bright sunny day - I walked around the corner and some kids had dropped a whole packet of glitter on the pavement - *WOWOWOWOWOWOOWOWO* It was an astonishing experience - I was stuck there for about 3 hours
@@Gretch_K - Im not making it up - people kept asking if I was ok, was I having a medical incident. Eventually, the sun went behind a cloud and I could leave.
Please don’t ever take any hallucinogens by yourself. Please always have a sober person to be with you. If hallucinogens have any chance of being legalized, people need to treat them responsibly. Thank you for your attention.
It's funny that you added the quartz countertop industry in there after the fact. My first thought was, 'I bet it's the countertop and tile business' because that's exactly what I use to make "natural" looking stone resin pours & wouldn't be surprised at all to find out they do it even with the real deal because natural stone isn't that sparkly no matter how much you polish it. If it aint them, it's definitely the makeup industry.
Nope, they use bismuth for that effect. Found that out in science class due to an odd combination of ditzy classmates and a "well let's find out!" science teacher. RIP Mr. Stewart, you were a beacon of light.
As a carpenter. Glitter in countertops and tiles is not a secret at all. Even the custom epoxy countertops are made with glitter. Like it's not some big secret in the construction world. Some products have glitter in it.
Something can be an open secret inside a trade and be totally unknown outside it. To the professional is common knowledge, the rest don't ask. Creating a knowledge devide. As said they might not want the expensive tabletop to be associated with cheap glitter. If you really wanted to know just track the cars leaving glittorex. You'll know soon enough.
i thought the point was that it's quartz, like people pay a lot of money to get the shiny rock, and they wouldn't pay so much if they knew that the shininess comes from simple glitter
I absolutely despise it. Every time I look at my black stone countertop, I think it's dirty because the glitter in it sparkles and looks like dust or crumbs or something. 😒
@@wa5657 If that were the case, they'd be committing fraud, and the glitter company would be complicit in the crime by knowingly abetting them. That's not likely to be it.
I was a munitions guy. I worked with chaff and flare daily. From the chaff I saw and had the misfortune of dumping onto myself/work tables, I never saw anything resembling glitter. It usually resembled fiberglass. Given various sizes of glitter it could probably work but the fibers allow vastly different sizes where square pieces of glitter wouldn't fit in a tube nearly as well. I have quartz countertops and can believe that 100
The Endless Thread podcast did a deep dive on this and called tons of representatives in tons of industries, and basically figured out that it's boat paint that is the biggest customer. That one boat paint manufacturer that made coatings for bass boats were buying 10, 30 gallon drums of glitter a week. And that was just one company. Across the industry it'd be thousands of barrels a year.
The fact that the person being interviewed was so nonchalant about this tells me that it's not as big a deal as we think it is. She's all like "You'll never guess it." and "You'd see something all right." If this really was a serious secret, she wouldn't be allowed to say anything about it. Maybe she would have just lied and said, "Well, gee. I'm not sure who our biggest client is. I guess I've never thought about it."
Agreed, this is probably just a default attitude of an employee who signed many NDAs. She doesn't quite remember what was in all those NDA she signed and her company signed, so she rather doesn't say. But at the same time, she's not worried very much, because it is unlikely that anyone would really mind and sue.
For sure. I have family that we learned decades later were big secret holders and back when the secrets actually mattered they would straight up lie if we got anywhere near it. You're not gonna dig too deep if you don't know there's anything to dig for
Agree, and quarts counter tops makes sense to, they don't want people to know its looks good because of glitter in it. Chaff could make sense but you mentioned plastic fiber with aluminium who would probably spread out more than rolls of glitter.
Yeah. It's like the secret ingredient of the Krabby Patty, there isn't one, it's just marketing. This keeps people talking about it and keeps it in the media, its free advertising.
This is now one of my top five favorite episodes on your channel. Who makes glitter, who is the largest user of glitter, and why are they secretive about it? These are things I have never pondered and now, because of you, I have an overwhelming desire to know more!
My guess is It's for weapons. Either propulsion and/or "thermite". Just add a little iron oxide. Vapor deposited aluminum's going to have a lot of surface area and burn really really quick. And the backing doesn't have to be boring PET, can you can use something really fun like cellulose nitrate. I'm thinking instead of chaff they might be making flairs and incendiary munitions.
@@jtjames79 I'd been thinking chaff as where most of it goes, but you've got a solid point there. Either way, military use would be a solid reason why they're being secretive about it.
@@Razmoudah Funny twist would be if the MOAB is actually a glitter bomb. Thermobaric weapons were inspired by grain explosions. I imagine finely powdered weaponized glitter could be a lot easier to properly disperse than a liquid or a gas.
@jtjames79 A somewhat frightening thought, but it would certainly work well. Mix in the right amounts of other micro-scale materials to modify the blast power and burning temperature and you could even potentially have mission specific variations that all rely on the same primary material. Damned, now I'm seeing it as a highly effective use and being rather practical.....now I just need to keep that from mixing with images of the Doki Gurlz from Behold: Humanity!
@@Razmoudah I've always had a frightening ability to MacGyver "energetic combustion" from random materials. Do a search for "fire piston" for the ultimate primitive blasting cap, I mean "fire starter".
The chaff I knew about, the quartz countertops, that sounds plausible, and I hadn't considered it. Plus, countertop makers really wouldn't want to hype that they weren't using 100% stone for your countertops. The reflective paint and road signs I know is not glitter, it's made of retroreflective materials produced by 3M - and their patent hasn't expired yet. It's basically glass beads for the road paint. They use something else for the signs but it's not glitter.
Personal vote: Food Packaging. The particle size isn't small (aka 1 wrapper = 1 particle) but think about how many packages you open up that seem "Foil lined". The same material used to make glitter can be cut larger to make food packaging. The fact that the primary material is still a plastic means that light heat can seal joints while still leaving an aluminum layer as a visible barrier. For comparison: Automotive paint. Takes about 3 gallons of paint per car, of which maybe all of 2.5 grams of metal flake (glitter) is added. One box of pop-tarts (4x packages of 2 tarts per box) has enough aluminized plastic to paint a car. Seals on your peanut butter or ketchup, layer of glitter glued to a backing material. Plastic can of coffee? sealed with glitter...
Glitter become one of my phobias since Ive read the story of a kid who accidentally inhaled a bunch of glitter and died a few days later from aphixiation. Apparently, the glitter cloggled the alveoli in the kid's lungs, producing a long agonizing death. Nope.
I would imagine he would've died either from fluid build up or infection. You'd have to inhale A LOT of glitter to completely cover enough alveoli to asphyxiate you...not to mention over a period of days. I imagine they'd do surgery and blow jets of air into the lungs to sweep as much out as possible, or there's at least something they could do other than just sit there and watch him die. Either that or it just sounds like an urban legend. I'm not buying it. That being said, I could definitely see the kid getting pneumonia due to fluid build up/inflammation that could definitely do some damage/kill him over a period of days.
The fact that glitter isn't illegal worldwide is insane considering the (micro)plastic problem. Then again, there is a lot of profit involved and when profit is involved the greater good is something that gets in the way. In general I believe there should be significantly more transparency in business we have seen that they can't behave themselves without it. Who knows, maybe one day we will be a society with a real democracy... until then it's the rich that make the laws not the people.
If you really wanted to do something about microplastic, you'd also have to ban all clothing made from artificial fibers. I can imagine if somebody tried to ban glitter, the glitter industry would point to this and demand equal treatment. And no politician would dare trying to ban plastic clothing. Of course all of those things need to be banned, and probably many more. But the political will is not there.
@@johannageisel5390definitely need to ban certain types of clothing and fabrics. In Europe you can get a filter for your washer draining to filter micro plastics but I don’t live in Europe. Hopefully there will be something in the USA for that soon. I could see glitter easily becoming so polarized and Republicans talking about how Democrats are trying to take your glitter and ruin your kids’ birthdays. And then they’ll ask, “what’s next? Fireworks?!” And we’ll say yeah, probably that would be good to get rid of too. And then the Republicans will say that if you don’t like glitter and fireworks you’re not patriotic, so dumb people will start lighting off fireworks more than ever before trying to make a stand. And then the planet will be fucked more than it already is. Oh my gawd. That’s actually exactly what would happen. I’m horrified by how accurate this probably is.
If you think the environmental issues surrounding glitter are bad check out the textile industry because that's way way waaaay worse. There's tiny micro plastic fibers in most of our clothes. The overwhelming majority of carpeting in people's homes are 100% tiny plastic fibers that shed and get tracked out into the environment and get thrown out when they're old and worn. And the manufacturing process for textiles can be dirty and hard on the environment too. Yeah, I'm not saying glitter is okay but if I could only clean up one industry at a time I'd tackle textiles first (not that we can't do more than one thing at a time). The thing is people love stretchy clothes so...
Quartz countertops was literally my first thought, because we just got those in my home and they sparkle sooo much. Glad to see I may have had my hunch down
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
My money is on 'it isn't a secret, their biggest customer just doesn't want their name associated with anyone or anything else'. When they were asked who it was, the responded just gave a 'it's top secret' as a joke. If I had to guess, it's probably some other glitter company that has some obscure patent that they are lending to GlitterX, GlitterX makes it and sells it to that company at a markup, and that company marks it up again for their bottom line. The other company doesn't want 1- to be associated, and 2- to have another investigative avenue to latch on to.
My best guess is the biggest customer of GlitterX is the US Military, not only chaft and stuff like that, but also as far as I am aware certain types of glitter can be used in automotive paints like mentioned; for stealth reasons like stealth planes and jets, when painted with certain secret formulas and techniques the paints refract light, radar and etc making the planes, jets, submarines or etc harder to detect or invisible to radar in general. I remember hearing about this first in some documentary that was discussing the stealth fighter plane (the black triangle looking one) developed in Area 51 before it got too well-known as a centre for conspiracies. In the documentary they mentioned using a specially designed secret paint that when used not only refracted light in a certain way to achieve the goal of stealth but also it was noted it was designed to increase the surface area drastically by adding micro triangles across the area to stop the radar waves instead of reflecting them back, if I remember correctly it was so the waves would bounce into the triangles and instead of being able to bounce back out they would just bounce back and forth between the triangles until they lost all of there potential energy.
I agree with your theory, i have done research into different effects you can get from automotive glitter paint and some sources talk about using very thin layers and up to 50 coats to achieve the desired color shifting effects. Yknow like those pearlescent colored cars that look dark green from one angle but have an orange reflection from another angle. Theres no telling what other effects could be achieved if you used more coats or different sized particles. The only hole i can think of in the theory is how many planes does the us military have in their fleet? Does it really take more glitter to paint these aircraft then any other client would use? Perhaps they are the biggest client because they use glitter for a multitude of things.
Actually, glitter makes every surface reflect, not absorb! That’s why it’s good to be chaff - chaff clouds redirect attention from the actual threat, challenging ‘traditional’ discrimination techniques.
I used to work at a commercial screen printing company, we didn't print t-shirts, it was a lot of large size banners, window clings for fast food stores, in-store display graphics and specialty items. We could use a really coarse mesh screen and print glitter. Yuck! We did a huge order of Christmas graphics once, it took several weeks. There was glitter everywhere, there was glitter on the cooler handles of a convenience store up the road, glitter in our homes, argh. There was a flood that drowned the print shop a couple of years later and afterwards when cleaning up the mess we still found glitter. Glitter is a harbinger of the end times I tell you.
As a kid I toured an IBM vinyl manufacturing facility and they were extremely secretive; wouldn't tell us who ANY of their clients were. I think that's just how manufacturers are -- maybe they don't want competitors offering their clients a deal to switch factories, or they don't want to be liable for any manufacturing errors. DoD does make the most sense to me though -- I could see not naming an actual client company if it was countertops, but she could have named the industry as a whole pretty safely.
@@EriclearnstosingIt's not just that. I worked at IBM for over twenty years, and it was always a big thing when a customer had agreed to be listed as a reference customer.
Chaff was my first thought too. And there would be a good reason to keep it on the low, because if you can manage to get the exact properties of the chaff, there is a possibility to work around it.
I remember the article in the NYT. The security at Glitterex far surpassed anything I expected for a company whose main business would be Michael's and elementary schools. My thought was chaff and the radar diffusing paint/coating on stealth fighters like the F-35. The coatings are proprietary, expensive, require special skills to apply and can only be applied by the company at their factory. I don't even know if they can be applied in the field or by nations that have bought the fighters. Exterior parts that lose their coating are sent to the factory to get reapplied every couple of flights.
True, but it's still no secret that glitter, or glitter like material, is used in chaff and diffusion paints. The exact specifications would be secret and would explain the security measures inside the factory, but that that use still wouldn't explain the volume of being the "single largest" customer. Consumer automotive paint, which also uses glitter like material openly but in proprietary formulas, would presumably far exceed what any military could use. Though this still would't meet the parameter of not being able to admit to it's use in that application. I think the "Quarts" building products have the win, knowing this makes them sound cheaper and less appealing so simple use would be a secret and would also explain volume.
Chaff is alluminum coated glass, not plastic. And as @ckl9390 pointed out, the military isn't exactly building hundreds of thousands of planes every year. The counter top, automotive, and marine industries each dwarf the military in terms of product sales (not going by inflated technology driven prices of military spending).
I worked at a craft store and we already were getting ready for Christmas in August so we would be covered on green, red, silver, white, and similar color glitters every day. It was like each ornament and floral pick had a whole container of glitter on it but only a few drops of glue. Anyone who I know who worked with glitter hates it
Our product prep area is a glitter zone once holiday product rolls in. It lingers. Makes me wonder what the factories in China look like all year. And how healthy are the people working there?
I'm surprised you didn't even mention the video by the youtube channel "CHUPPL" where they tracked down and interviewed the son of the inventor of glitter. It turns out glitter companies are actually precision cutting companies first and glitter companies second. If you're interested in this mystery in any way at all you should definitely watch that video, it's probably the closest you'll get to a definitive answer
Did you all even watch the video...? He DID mention that glitter was invented my mistake, as a "byproduct" of the company that precision cut photo paper, and made synthetic "snow"... What else is there to add by referencing, and redirecting people's attention off to someone else's UA-cam channel? Umm... nothing. I think that Joe did a great job highlighting the mystery. Well... other than NOT actually solving it... but, I guess no one else has either. So, there's that.
I used to work inside sales at a countertop wholesaler and the majority of what went into these countertops (at least our brands, which were made in China) are crushed stone, crushed quartz, resin and dyes. Most of the more sparkly variants are sparkly due to mirror and glass chunks. Also, these days, most of the more popular colors people are building with have no sparkle anymore as the trends are changing towards marble look-alikes.
Yes I have thought about glitter. I do it each time I encounter it. It's literally microplastic pollution which doesn't serve any other solid purpose for most people
It's much more secretive than you can imagine. The glitter is used as a feed additive in clandestine unicorn farms. It's required to ensure consistent rainbow farts.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my mother told me it was pieces of glass (I cringe when I see eye shadow with glitter). I don't know if that was true, but I still never get it near my face. 😊
How did you miss the guys that ACTUALLY interviewed the son of the inventor of glitter? (or something like that) That's by far the best video about this topic 😢 Confirms EVERY theory and says that the government/military are the biggest client. That the useful part of this company is the PRECISSION METAL CUTTING.
@@boogieknee3781 ah va va entonces hablemos en mi propio idioma, supongo que tu ortografía ha de ser perfecta en español también. Oye ¿vas a añadir algo a mi comentario? ¿O solo estás molestando?
The quartz theory sounds 'bout right. Customers would definitely be irritated to find out that the luxurious, quarts counter tops they just had installed in their home are on par with the ones in their 7 year old daughters Barbie Townhouse. 😂 I know its just a small percentage being used in the manufacturing process but I can still see a lot of folks making a stink over it. So it would probably be something that all involved would rather keep quiet about.
Also, if I got a stone countertop, I would want to be preparing food right on it. Knives, dough, scraping plates... THere's gonna be even more microplastics n my food than usual!
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
It's called dusting , a tracking system! Used in highly sensitive indoor areas to track personnel location. The sad part about the glitter industry is the fact that the glitter can get into your tissues and cause cancer😮
First, what does "biggest client" mean? The client who buys the most? The one who pays the most? The one for whom glitter, or a specific type of glitter, is most important? The client for whom they spend the most time on manufacturing to the most demanding specifications? My thought is that glitter is going into something these days that we've NEVER been allowed to know the real formula for: paper money.
No the key is that people think about this the wrong way, the biggest customer of the biggest glitter company, no one ever said they are buying glitter from them. What the biggest customer is getting from them is the excess to some of the best precision cutting equipment. One of the companies that first invented Glitter was contracted by the US government long before it invented Glitter, at the time they were known for being extremely precise with cutting stuff and they worked on the Manhattan Project
@@marvinvogtde nope, that doesn't line up with what the employee said in the interview. "they don't want people to know it's glitter" and "you would see something"
@@marvinvogtdeThe glitter industry might have been at the forefront of precision machining at one time. But there are so many industrial applications with more exacting requirements now that I’m certain they aren’t anymore.
Chaff was the first thing I thought of. Russia also uses it in their nuclear weapons in an effort to defeat the United States' missile shield and radar systems. That, in itself, wouldn't make up much volume of glitter, but it's definitely something the company wouldn't want you to know about, and if you combine it with all the other uses of chaff, it adds up and is definitely something that would give the company a bad rep if the general public knew.
@@gavinjenkins899 Did you watch the video its a secret, like operation window and the later experiments in Halifax bombers that my grandfather flew so I see plenty of reasons to motivate secrecy pertaining to radar jamming.
@@MrLunithy Yes, I did watch the video, the fact it's stated as a secret in the video is WHY this is a dumb explanation. Because it makes no sense for this to be secretive if this was the client. You just saying it does 15 times doesn't make it make sense. You've given no actual reason why you think this would be secretive.
Aerospace primer coats are chromate based when used for military applications as an oxidation inhibitor. It’s the green coat on almost every airplane that gets sprayed. I have to file applications with the California Air Resources Board every time someone wants to spray the stuff. They also have a copper based formula used in space applications for shielding. Both spray on like standard paint and have to be pre-mixed using that type of metal flake (glitter). 50lb bags of it at a time. ❤
Mountain bike tubeless tire sealant uses glitter as one of the main components to help clog up punctures. Most people are unaware of this, and the material is usually dressed up in all sorts of fancy marketing terms rather than "we put glitter in there".
The secrecy bit made me immediately think of the food industry. Considering how many people already freak out about any kind of additives, and the huge potential for lost marketshare, it makes the most sense to me.
I was too! Until the counter top theory. My dad builds houses and people are very appearance and "high class look" stuck up! It would kill the trend of "granite" counter tops.
Except for the comment, "Oh, you will see it..." implying it's easily visible as to where the glitter is used. I'm thinking makeup. That's a *MASSIBE* market share, though the make-up industry is supposedly moving away from microplastics in make-up (not fast enough). Either that, or vehicle paint-boat & land.
@Drachenfrau you'll see it, but won't recognize it. They spent years making food ads out of all sorts of things. Legislation passed to put a stop to that, but there's still loopholes for the amount of 'fillers' they can use. Saline added to meats to make them more juicy, added salt and sugar in absolutely everything. Want all your sugary snacks to look even more appealing and eye-catching? Glitter.
@@DrachenGothik666everyone knows glitter is in makeup tho. She said it’s in something that they don’t want people to know about and not already obvious
I think if she could guess how much controversy she would bring by refusing to answer, she would go with the second biggest client or anything really 🤷♀️
I think the countertops and vinyl flooring, and other building materials that are shiny, really does make the most sense. We are like magpies. We love shiny things.
The tile/countertop theory and the chaff/military theory both seem so incredibly logical and plausible to me that I kinda believe both simultaneously as answers. The others I'm more iffy on or don't buy
I've always heard glitter's biggest customer is chaff for military planes and it's a closely guarded secret how exactly it's made so others can't engineer around it for radar guided missiles
My initial thought was "chaff", which is released from airborne vehicles to confuse the radar of attackers. However, I looked it up, and, though it used to be particles of foil, modern chaff is made of glass fibres. Dang. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)#Modern_chaff
my theory has always been shampoo etc., maybe that's not that surprising of an industry, but i've always noticed that weird super fine shimmer in various shampoo brands wondering what exactly it was. Could be a very subtle effect that makes your hair look much shinier and healthier somehow that you can't quite place, that is cheap for them. Certainly now with concerns over microplastics in our bodies and the environment, they wouldn't want people to know, but the legislation mentioned in the toothpaste argument should eliminate that theory
@@TestyMcTesterson My spouse & I saw that video and thought this "mystery" had been put to bed a long while ago. Just this last weekend we were at the US's biggest trout fishing destination and saw so many boats. We talked about glitter being in boat, especially bass boat paint, & Barely Sociable's video. Then, this morning this video pops up. I'm betting the people at GlitterX are just like, OMG, here we go again.
@@Lux_Lethal haha nice! I just found Barely Social last week and I've been listening to all of his far too small backlog the last few days. He does a great job doing very thorough investigations.
My first thought is that glitter manufacturers have been incentivized through the years to put a lot of resources towards r&d for various industries. They specialize in creating materials that reflect light in specific ways. So my mind goes to military uses. Maybe very specialized paint that bounces light in a way that camouflages it, even more effective chaff that they want kept secret. Anything that uses very specialized geometry for the particles, grooves in the particles, materials, cutting/manufacturing techniques, and so much more I can’t imagine. I’m sure the countertop manufacturers don’t want people knowing it’s glitter, but I feel like there’s got to be more interesting uses for a company that specializes in how light bounces off of tiny particles.
But there's also the volume to consider. experimental paint for a couple dozen experimental low-radar-profile jets wouldn't be the largest single consumer of the largest manufacturer of glitter in the US. The exact refractive geometry or even admitting that they were on contract for that project would be very secretive, but it wouldn't be the single largest contract.
@@ckl9390 If you start to consider the size of the world and what it takes to manipulate the weather globally if this is such a thing, the volume would be immense. Solar radiation management is a continuing ongoing program not experiments. I’m not saying that glitter is 100% a part of this endeavor, I am saying that reflecting heat back into the space is the goal. What if glitter happens to be the cheapest form of reflective material we could create at high volumes?…
Another sparkling new video from the colorful mind of the sparkliest guy I know, Joe Scott. Thank you for reflecting on this subject and shining new light on this scintiallting subject. I personally did not have a glimmer of an idea about any of this shiny subject.
I did nerd out on this. Ok, here’s my theory. Pharmaceuticals/Deodorant. Why? Aluminum chloride is used reduce sweating. Plastic coated aluminum dropped in acids produce aluminum chloride. Mixed with an alkali, it would produce hydrogen gas. But aluminum hydroxide is used for gas and heartburn.
Wouldn't the most likely reason just be that the glitter company doesn't want their competitors to know their unusual biggest customer because then they might try to poach that customer? Like it could be anything of the things you suggest but there's no need for some deep confidentiality demand by the user but instead the glitter company just considers their client list to be a trade secret. Heh ETA: I see you covered this at the very end right after I wrote this comment prematurely.
I like to think Glitterex was looking into branching out and finding new clients so let the conspiracy spiral out in the internet to see what other uses glitter could have
It's not that they won't name the customer by name. Of course that'd be confidential. It's that they won't even say how it's being used, generally, in what general areas. Competition is not a concern when speaking in broad terms about the biggest users of glitter. It's implausible that any competitor big enough and competent enough go pose a threat, wouldn't already know this.
I bought one of those 1000x handheld microscope from Amazon a whole ago, and one of the crazy things I found is......"glitter is EVERYWHERE"! It's all over our bodies, and it's microscopic. It's almost a touch alarming, because I presume it's in our bodies too.
@@ce1581 There isn't any such thing. The trails you see behind aircraft are ice crystals formed by super heated exhaust causing water vapor and the altitude causing that vapor to flash freeze. I should know i'm both a pilot and repair/build aircraft.
@@ce1581 aircraft mechanic also agree with the dude who replied. Besides even if they were using glitter for “chemtrails” it would probably do more to cause rain than anything
A little pushback on the quartz countertops: the “10% additives” of quartz countertops is actually what makes them white, or grey, or black: it’s acrylic. Nothing saying it COULDNT contain glitter, but that’s what they’re referring to. Source: I worked in a home improvement store selling flooring and worked closely with the bath and kitchen department who sold countertops and cross trained a lot
I woukd expand to use in transportation. Think of high visibility paint, decals, and paving materials used to make the reflective stripes on the road, reflective roadsigns, traffic cones, high visibility striping on emergency vehicles, etc. We could be literally saving lives by using glitter to make stuff easier to see. The granite countertop/building material suggestion is a good one. I think they have their sparkly hands in a ton of industries.
My favorite theory is resort beach sand. Look how much prettier the sand at resorts is than the sand at most public beaches. And that would mean they were for sure washing glitter into the ocean, which I doubt they'd want people to know about. (But the quartz theory does feel pretty legit.)
When I was in high school, I wasn’t in theater, but some of my friends were. One of them called glitter “theater herpes,” to which I said, “I thought regular herpes was theater herpes. You guys are always sleeping with each other.”
I feel like Hallmark has to be the biggest glitter using industry. I can't walk within 3 aisles of greeting cards without getting covered with glitter.
One Christmas I was shopping at Michaels for ribbon. I could not find any ribbon I liked without glitter. I hate glitter just for the way it sheds, but can't be cleaned up.
I can't imagine a hell worse then working in a glitter factory. You know that stuff has to be so deeply ingrained in everything you own there is no escaping it.
I wonder how sparkly their lungs are…
My dad worked in the milk powder plant of a dairy company and his entire car was contaminated with milk powder from his clothes and hair (with the obvious side-effect of milk contamination) - the only vehicle I've ever been in where I got "car sick" from just getting into the car, before the engine even started. Glitter's got to be just as pervasive - though fortunately probably smells better...
@@wolf1066 my god. I'd have to get a $500 burner car for sure just for work.
@@likebutton3136 Your $500 burner car would've cost more than dad paid for his car...
You come home and sit down on the couch. Your butt was covered in glitter.
You try to rub your eyes. There's glitter under your fingernails. Ouch.
You accidentally cut a gash into your finger. Only glitter pours out of the wound.
You call your spouse for help and grab their hand. They dissolve into a pile of glitter.
You look at your children carefully, their skin has a shimmer to it. They were always made of glitter.
You look at your whole life. Only glitter.
You wake up. You're still in the glitter factory.
Even if it isn't anything nefarious I can pretty much guarantee that if they "don't want people to know it's glitter", then it is either bad for consumers, the environment, or both.
🎯
You can't get much more nefarious than damaging health and ecosystems. "Don't want people to know it's glitter" means it's something people interact with and are aware of, so it wouldn't make sense for it to be spy taggers or something you're not supposed to encounter or know of at all.
actually most of the glitter gets vaporized-and chaff is maked from AL string or streamers not glitter
?
@@garyshan7239
I wonder if Glitter-X ever expanded out into mica based glitter? That stuff is in absolutely everything nowadays. Particularly all manner of paints and cosmetics, even processed food.
I could imagine that they wouldn't want that being in the press, as it's my understanding that's it's still primarily being mined in third world countries.
By children. Child slaves.
Because they're the only ones small enough to fit into the narrow passageways of the mines.
Which regularly collapse.
Mica is pretty much up there with the bulk of the chocolate industry in terms of knowingly and primarily relying on child slavery to source their product.
I taught at a children’s museum. We called glitter “craft herpes “. Because you can’t get rid of all of it. Later in life I repaired paint jobs at a GM plant. Metallic flake paints were the hardest to repair. Glitter minus the plastic was the flake. I’m retired now and living in Nova Scotia. Mica is everywhere here. The beach, in gravel. Environmental artists use mica flakes instead of glitter. I know some potters that do. Get rid of the stuff. It’s just bad news.
My daughter once rolled BJJ with a small amount of residual glitter in her hair.
It was on the mat for weeks. You CAN’T get it all.
😂
*pulls out a small pile of glitter from behind your ear* 🙁 you are right
I am certain I have glitter in my hair STILL from kindergarten craft time. I am now 30 XD
My grandpa lived near Coos Bay, Oregon and he had a hobby of collecting interesting trash that washed ashore (My favorite was his collection of old glass floaters that broke away from fishing nets and buoys and floated over from Japan). There's actually a small art industry in the area making art from the plastics and debris that wash up on the beach.
I once convinced a girl in high school that glitter was an asexually reproducing organism and that’s why we couldn’t get it out of the theater stage wings.
This is the funniest comment on this whole video this is so out of left field lmao
Also peak high school experience
That's called the kipple effect.
This is wild! Lol😂 and wildly not the wildest thing I've ever heard 😮😂
That accidental glitter discovery seems made up... but ok 😂
I hope you got somewhere with her..
During the sponsorship, I was thinking "Oh goodness, they use glitter in microwave meals." and then I was "oh, it's just the sponsorship."
Lolol I thought the same thing hahahaha
that’s exactly where i thought it was leading
Wouldn't that make some sense? Glitter would absorb the microwave radiation and heat up, allowing a more uniform heat distribution. But I think that carbon fibres might be working just as well while being less conspicuous.
Maybe in the packaging, though?
The truth is out there.
Haha same 😂
I don't know if anyone will get this...
In the past, people looked to some eagle-eyed people older than expected from today's experience with people. Why? What do the "kems" from packaging, rugs, etc do to systemic "harmones"? Is it an unintended consiquence, or not. Hopefully we can put the *toothpaste* back in the tube.
About 20 years ago I saw a segment on some show about Nielsen-Massey (the vanilla extract company). They were showing the process and when asked were very cagey about what happens to the seeds after all the flavor is extracted. Someone researched and it turns out their biggest customer for that was Breyers. Their Vanilla Bean ice cream is made with extract for flavor and the flavorless seeds we all see are thrown in for looks and to make people believe they are getting something special.
I'm not mad about it. Good way to use what would otherwise be waste, harmless, and it made for a unique selling point. That's fine.
*Scandalized
Yep, I did a self- blind taste challenge years ago. Braums, Beyers, and Blue Bell.
Breyers was the most TASTELESS! Blue Bell was the BEST!!!! Each brand was labeled as the same flavor.
Oh, yes, it was a blind test because somebody assisted me. A blindfold was used, they scooped up a small amount, and my mouth was rinsed after each taste.
@@lourias I am spoiled because I grew up and still live in the land of frozen custard. Ice cream just doesn't do it.
@@hectorsmommy1717frozen custard????🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤
So, I was in the flooring industry for 20 years and I have been involved in filing claims against product manufacturers for failures several times. I can tell you with 100% certainty that all adhesive manufacturers add glitter to their products so they can positively identify which product was used. Each product has a different glitter composition so that under a microscope it would be easy to identify who was the manufacturer and to ensure the recommended adhesive was used for the application. If you think about the amount of adhesives used I could easily see 500 tons of glitter being used for this purpose.
Are adhesive manufacturers assigned a glitter code, like an ID? This one gets aluminum on purple plastic, this one gets zinc on orange, etc?
I don't think you could *see* that though.
@@arenomusic/ more or less. The manufacturer will have custom unique blends for each customer, and for each use case the customer needs which can be positively identified as a DNA like ingredient
There are two problems with this theory. First is that it isn't even a little bit secret that the adhesives are tagged, the manufacturers want you to know that they will be able to tell if you used the right one or not. And second, the amount of glitter in a pail of glue is really small, I really can't see them using nearly as much as automotive paint.
@@FLPhotoCatcher ...In the can or on the floor while wet, maybe.
If you want Earth friendly alternatives to Glitter:
1. Mica Powder, as mentioned in the video. Mica is naturally occurring, and they add pigments to give them bold, beautiful colors. Mica is most commonly used in Makeup, so it's body safe as well. There are plenty of sustainably and ethically sourced mica products.
2. Eucalyptus Pulp Fibers. BioGlitz, one of the upcomming biodegradable glitter manufacturers, uses exclusively Eucalyptus Pulp Fibers to create their shine. Like Mica, they add pigments for color. BioGlitz is also ethically AND sustainably sourced, + they're accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council. FDA approved and GMO absent. BioGlitz is not the only biodegradable eucalyptus manufacturer though, check out your options!!
Keep in mind though: Make sure the product is ethically and sustainably sourced before you can confidently call it Eco-Friendly. While these are better alternatives to plastic and aluminum glitter, Mica is not naturally renewable and Eucalyptus takes 6 to 8 years to fully grow into a viable tree for pulp fiber extraction. Use your biodegradable glitter with pride, but still be wise with it like you would regular glitter. Do your research and find out what works for you lovelies.
I knew about mica being used for glitter but not about the eucalyptus pulp fibers.
Mica is also quite bad for you to breathe. Mica powder sounds horrendous.
@@mpk6664 That is good to know. I was looking at using earth friendly products rather than plastic. I have asthma problems so I'll watch out for this.
i’m pretty sure mica has a huge issue with child labor so that one wouldn’t be better
The comment i was ACTUALLY looking for ! Thank you ❤
Back in the 80s, I knew an old man who was a great fisherman. I was always asking him to tell me his secrets. He finally did. Glitter. He dipped all his baits and tackle in it. The water would be full of sparkling toxic plastic, and the fish thought it was a feeding frenzy. I never used his secret.
Oof
And then he would sell and eat those plasticy fish, and whichever he didn't, others did 😢
@@erinaa9486 Microplastics are in fish, especially these days. A little bit extra couldn't hurt.
Mayhap we have incidentally stumbled upon the answer?
I've never considered trying that but the tiny scales of small fish when being eaten in a feeding frenzy does look exactly like a tiny glitter bomb going off. Now I gotta invent biodegradable glitter lure dip dammit.
@@rhinovirus2225biodegradable glitter already exists if that helps you. And “edible glitter” which is really just sugar
I have another theory. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing. For the glittery anti-counterfeit marks and holograms (iridescence) they put on money. I'd imagine that if those things are made slightly wrong, it could be easily spotted by the Secret Service. They could be the biggest customer not in terms of weight, but perhaps in terms of cost, because of difficulty to manufacture and strict tolerances.
This make a lot of sense. 🤔The *US Treasury* could have a contract to have a secret glitter formulated exclusively for their use. They would not want anyone to know the formula to thwart counterfeiters, and the contract would specify that not only the formula but themselves as well must remain a secret. 🤫
This is what I was going to comment..some kind of passport or cash security feature, it’s the only thing I can think of that they would want to keep quiet.
This is pretty plausible
Wow, great idea!
@@Admiralty86 the other side of my brain says that if it was for something so critical the US gov would have their own glitter factory….or the firm would never be allowed to tell people there is a big important customer they can’t tell you about if it was for this purpose 🤷🏻♂️😂
In Brazil, in the week after the carnival, when everyone is back to their boring lives, and at work, in a multinational company, for that stressful budget meeting, the president of the company is raging complaints all around, but then in that moment, that sweet moment, you see some glitter shining somewhere around his face and you remember: he is also just a human being.
And no matter how many showers you take after the carnival. The glitter is now part of you, in a symbiotic relationship, to remind you, during many days to come, about those mistakes you want to forget
An oratory trick my mum taught me. If you are to speak in front of "important people" and it makes you anxious just remind yourself: each and every one of them woke up, brushed their teeth and groggily shuffled into their kitchen then set a pot of coffee before frying some eggs. Probably in their PJs or underwear.
@@denisdrozdoff2926wouldn't work on me! I don't have breakfast, drink anything, or brush my teeth in the morning 😏
@@Mr.Anders0n_facts. I was already awake, alert and ready for anything. Who sleeps?
@@mason4354 i don't sleep. I close my eyes and flow into alternate dimensions and universes. I spend the night roaming those strange lands and encountering different versions of me among other colourful characters... Who would willingly want to miss out on this?
I just remember elementary school and all the girls had glitter in their hairline. I always thought that was such a crazy thing that girls did, and I remember spending all afternoon trying to figure out how to remove glitter from someone's hairline (Dunk head under water and then agitate their scalp? Lice comb? Straight-up shaving their head and starting over??)
Several years ago I was making my new granddaughter a fuzzy blanket. Hello Kitty with pink and white snuggly soft micro fleece. If you have ever cut this super sparkling microfleece you know a super fine dust is created as your cutting it into the size you need. I was recovering from my 5th surgery that year and I was convalescening in bed while I cut my fabric pieces, happy as I could be and it was really cold outside so i was snuggled with my dogs and my project. Where it gets very funny is that my husband is a detective Sargent in a law enforcement agency. He worked night that year. He leaned in to kiss me goodbye and glittery sparkly dust stuck to him like mosquitoes drawing blood. Well he got to work and it was very clearly seen all over his clothing under UV light. He lit up like Christmas tree. The laughter I heard over the phone as he told me over the phone what happened , i could hardly hear him speaking because his brothers in blue were laughing so hard.
Aww, that's cute. You know what's crazy? Up to 40% of police personnel have uniforms and equipment contaminated by glitter. Look it up yourself! Google "40% cops"
I work for a quartz manufacturer, and I can tell you for sure we do not use glitter. When we want quartz to sparkle we use specially treated chunks of glass. That being said, we manufactured in the US. The majority of quartz is made over seas, so it's possible those practices are different.
Sorry you got your comment stolen by the booty bot 😢
That's what you want us to think ;-) (I'm joking, but I'm certain someone really does believe this)
Suuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrre buddy................ . . . Sure.
Well, that is kinda glitter but probably not the kind they mean here. But yeah, the plastic part seems like a stupid idea to use, I could see some company using aluminum for the job but that would also just be kinda glitter.
I don't really see why this would be a secret anyways, just like with paint so I don't think this would be it.
Thats because you guys are legit. DEFINITELY can see the Chinese industry pulling that crap. _AND_ it would make perfect sense why an American company would want to keep something like that secret
All I know is that many years I let a neighbor use my house for a baby shower. Now… over a decade later I am STILL finding glitter in plants, shoe bottoms, everywhere. You can’t get it out, ever, I swear the little glitter things are alive and breed. 😊
Where's the door to door vacuum salesmen when you need em???
Or, just burn it down. Please don't......haha
tinsel is the same way, and party confetti.
@@candlestyx8517 - Ahh Party confetti! 🤣👍🏼
@@michaelpipkin9942 - I have a good vacuum, LOL! AND I use it often!
@@candlestyx8517Not even close. I clean party venues, the confetti & tinsel you can get in one cleaning. But glitter & shimmers… the lounge will never be free of.
The most plausible explanation I can think of for the spokesperson not wanting to reveal their biggest customer is they don't want to give that away to their competitors.
DOD?
@@lukebaehr3851automotive industry. It’s the major part of car paint.
It wasn’t a customer, it was their biggest industry.
@@gmotdot yes but that information could be used by competitors.
@@wtfwhereamiWhile it is used in car paint, it turns out that it's not the main consumer of glitter. The main buyer of glitter is the government.
I think the countertops idea is probably spot on. I recall watching a video a couple of years ago about the construction of an underground train station in London. Because the station was so far underground no natural light entered it and they were concerned about it looking drab and depressing. So they mixed glitter into the concrete they used to construct the internal walls. Not so it would be sparkly but just enough so that it reflected a small amount of light and therefore didn't appear matte and drab. So I imagine that glitter is used fairly often in construction. And because of the "natural" appearance of stone countertops they probably wouldn't want people knowing there is something incredibly unnatural in them.
What's bizarre to me is that plastic straws and grocery bags that nearly always end up in the landfill were banned in Canada before something that nearly always ends up as litter and that practically cannot be removed from the environment.
Yeah glitter should really be banned.
Too many lobbyists keeping it legal.
@@robertabarnhart6240 All those damned scrapbookers
When my restaurant switched to paper straws, but also switched to plastic cups.
What's crazier is that a single piece of steak, just one piece, produces as much carbon pollution as an entire month worth of household plastic waste. One single piece of steak. And yet governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you not to use straws, while subsidising the animal agriculture industries to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. Total hypocrisy.
Oh, and that also means that anyone who pretends to care about climate change / the environment and still eats meat is nothing more than a virtue signalling hypocrite. Fact.
I used to work for this a makeup company. They had this ugly Grey powder that was literal diamond powder worth about 5k per kilo. It was used so a company could legally say they use diamonds in their products. What did they use to make it LOOK like shimmery diamonds? Glitter
So I totally believe the quartz theory
The quartz theory has a lot going for it
Microplastics are everywhere. We should not be making more. I'm guessing it ends up in food and toothpaste. That would not be something we would expect, and definitely not be something they would want us to know.
"diamond powder"
So literally just carbon powder.. graphite powder.. ground up pencils. People with too much money on their hands are supremely gullible and stupid. At least when it comes to expensive stuff.
@@ericalbers4867 No! diamond powder is not graphite. Small diamonds are actually easy to manufacture, and if cartels didn't control the supply in South Africa, natural diamonds would be very cheap, they're so plentiful. So it's not people with "too much money", it's all of us who put a diamond ring on our spouse's fingers, who are the suckers. Stop looking your nose down any other group of people and start questioning what you do that is gullible and stupid.
@@squirlmy industrial grade diamonds for saw blades and such are not pretty.
The military rumor has been flying around the tabletop gaming world for ages. Metallic model paints, which use glitter, end up with a shortage every time there's a new conflict. Even the lack of components for making white metal causing gaming companies to switch to resin and plastic right after the invasion of Iraq. I'd always heard the story that every X number of years, our stealth fighters needed to be repainted using paint with glitter, but chaff makes just as much sense. Side note, the invasion of Ukraine caused an immediate glitter shortage for model paints. Large companies like Games Workshop were out for months.
Huh...that's an interesting connection. Now I'm latched on to this being what it is. I wonder what happened to craft glitter during each invasion?
And they not wanting people to know could be just that the military is oversensitive about the glitter jokes and associations.
Makes sense
@@lunacouer I've never looked into it. And again, it's all rumor and conjecture. But one would also have to factor in whether or not smaller model paint manufacturers are further down the pecking order compared to gigantic craft companies selling standard glitter. I'm not sure if they'd correlate.
thats so interesting lol
Never in my life did i think I'd be this invested in a glitter mystery. Great video! Earned a sub for sure.
Chessex, a company that manufactures polyhedral dice sets, has a line of dice called Chessex Borealis. They use extremely fine glitter to give them this particular sheen. Several years ago, they were forced to change the glitter in the dice because the US Treasury started using that particular glitter in US currency. That particular glitter is so proprietary that no other dice maker in the world has been able to exactly duplicate Old Glitter Chessex Borealis, though every dice maker from hobbyists to huge manufacturing plants the world over has tried. So make of that what you will.
I like the answer, bank notes is a contender,
@@charlesmurray3255 That makes sense. I think everyone knows now who supplies the paper, but no one but the gov't gets to buy it.
@@charlesmurray3255when i worked retail there were times when I thought the bills, 50s and 100s in particular, looked rather sparkly
@@charlesmurray3255 I doubt it would make the running--they don't make that much paper money, & the glitter doesn't form a large enough component of it to make that big of a detail. No, I don't think U.S money would be the biggest buyer. If there was a central world printer of currency, that might work as a theory, but each nation prints their own money.
Interesting comment!
Boat paint is often ablative meaning it’s meant to wear off to prevent things from growing on it. More or less they are slowly dumping glitter into the water to protect the boats.
Exactly what i thought, especially all the sand and other shit in the water that slowly erodes at the paint, people forget that salt water can be pretty abrasive, 100% they dont wanna talk about it because it would be like opening the pandoras box of glitter ocean pollution
@@excalibur2038 WRONG. The problem isn't glitter, bud; you're barking up the wrong tree. Think long and hard now: what is a fiberglass hull made of? What is gel coat?
But lets look beyond boats for a moment; let's look at YOUR lifestyle.
When you purchase groceries, what do you carry you food out in? Paper bags maybe? More commonly a plastic bag, reusable or otherwise, right? And what does the vast majority of food come packaged in? Plastic, right?
You drive a car, right? Look at your seats. Are they covered in leather, or is it plastic? What do you think is under the fabric? Look up, what do you see? It ain't cotton! The dash board - what's that? The radio? Shift knob? Compartment covers? Carpet? Trim? You see plastic everywhere you look, right? Look at your car's paint. Is it still glossy? Or has the PLASTIC clear coat started to wear off? Or has is worn away entirely? And those tires - my oh my, those tires - you drive tens of thousands of miles on those things, and they wear down. Yeah... where do you think all that goes?
You go to McDonalds, order a soda. Some places you'll get a paper straw because people didn't like seeing pictures of a turtle with a straw up its nose. But you still get a PLASTIC lid.
Your clothes. What are they made of? And what do you pull off your dryer's lint filter? Yeah, lots of plastic there. How much plastic fiber from your clothes got flushed down the drain by the washing machine?
It all has to go somewhere. A lot of your personal plastic waste ends up in the landfill, where it's mostly sequestered. But not all of it. A lot of your plastic ends up in the water, where it slowly breaks down into tiny pieces. Sometimes that water is in the ocean. And sometimes, that water is your drinking water. Yes, you may well be drinking some of your own plastic pollution!
Boats are an insignificant source of plastic pollution in the ocean, and your personal consumption is far, far more impactful.
@@warpedweirdo bro i dont need you to explain to me how much plastic we use in society, everyone knows this, i was talking about who the glitter companies sell too and why they wouldn't want people too know
@@excalibur2038 sounds like they want you to dump some glitter in the ocean.
Anti-fouling paint (prevents growth of algae and barnacles) is based on copper and is pretty nasty stuff (it has to be to prevent stuff from growing on it). It's subject to strict regulations when stripping it off (before applying new paint). If large amounts of it came off in the water, that would defeat the purpose. And there's no need to decorate it with glitter since it's below the waterline (the waterline you see on boats and ships delineates the boundary between regular not-so-toxic decorative paint, and toxic anti-fouling paint).
Tell any car bro that you like the glitter on their car, and you will instantly get sharply corrected _"It's called FLAKE!"_
Yes snowflakes😂, on and in the car
"It's not a doll, mom, it's an action figure!"
Oh God I am going to say this to so many people I know just to get them going 😂😂
Yeah flake is flake. Flake is big and looks like glitter. But the "metallic" paints are also just a finer glitter added to the paint. My current vehicle I would swear is a base coat/cream coat, but if you look close you can find the occasional glitter sparkle in there. Maybe 10 sparkles per inch. You can even see it if you aren't looking under a magnifier. Why would they add it if you can't see it?
"your paint flakes? Must be a pretty bad paint job!"
I just bought some little pots of body glitter at Dragon Con that isn’t plastic-it’s eucalyptus fiber!
So far I love Uniglitter’s “bio glitter.” There are far fewer color options, of course, but it feels good on your skin and looks good!
Random, but I was at DragonCon too!
@@d_lynn421 Wishing you all the best in post-Con recovery! I’m definitely still operating at a sleep deficit.
Man, you don't just casually tell people you went to a sex fetish convention.
@@bloodleader5Well, YOU don't 😅
Hey, they admitted to being a stripper so why not own up to attending a sex fetish convention.
Isn't discussing body glitter the same as saying "I am a stripper"?
I worked for a countertop manufacturer, and the majority of what they used for the iridescent and glitter effect was actually ground seashells from mussels other things. That was just one company though.
Mussels. And yeah that makes a lot of sense!
Muscles? Eewwwww! I hope you mean mussels.
I did this on my phone...guess it corrected it to human muscles, and that would be weird.
"seashells" That's exactly what big tile wants us to think 😂
So your countertops are not vegan
Countertop theory does make sense, as I feel that a lot of upper middle class suburbanites splurge on them because its supposed to be made of "rare and exotic pretty rocks" and if the customers were aware that the shine was mostly caused by glitter, they'd feel like they were getting ripped off by the price tag.
My brother in law got very angry with me when I told him that his 'quartz' counter tops where a composite and not '100% solid quartz' like the salesman told him.
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
I would suspect that consumer glitter purchases would vastly outweigh the amount of glitter that could be in quartz countertops. The government, and especially the DoD would make sense to me. There are a few things you can do with glitter that most people probably wouldn’t expect and they seem to be things the DoD would want to use it for.
if you saw that you wouldn't think that's glitter?
I like to believe Glitter is actually sold as a drug substance to Aliens, because it's basically space meth to them.
I'm probably going to think "space meth" everytime I see glitter for the rest of my life, now.
sounds reasonable
Lmao
Can you imagine that aliens dont have pizza or popcorn
That sounds unlikely, who would get high on aluminum and plastic? I could see some cartel cutting their cocaine with it though (the tiniest micro glitter) but I don't think they would inform the company that is what they are doing in that case.
I remember the day I found out that there was such a job as a “forensic glitterologist.” It was on an older episode of forensic files. Homes boy had every single size, shape, color, etc. of glitter basically ever, and his job was to like ide tidy glitter found at crime scenes. I was dying I was like this man is my spirit animal.
Forensic files was a such great show. Binged the show awhile back and was instantly hooked like watching Unsolved Mysteries.
My first thought was chaff. Any time there's a bunch of money going toward something and people can't talk about what it is I feel like it's usually something to do with the military. And it definitely checks the box as far as the glitter company not wanting to talk about it. Glitter is often associated with art, creativity, and fun. I can imagine that people might be upset to know that the glitter they are using for their arts and crafts is also used in a military plane that can kill people. It's probably not good PR for the glitter company.
Our aircraft carriers can be huuuge, like the size of a small town. Not sure how sparkly they are, I never paid attention when I was visiting before, but I will if I get to in the future. Anyway, all those vehicles, missiles, satellites, and even our officers' uniforms have sparkly bands around their hats, sleeve cuffs, and collars. The marble counters, award cases, memorials, and flooring in and around all our military monuments, gravestones, and other structures...
I can see military usage as well.. wonder if it's useful for cloaking or holographic things.. 🤔🤐🫡😶🌫️👽🤯
Quartz and granite for decoration is most plausible but get a feeling it will be a military purpose key national security assets need multiple suppliers so could well be they produce "glitter" and sell it as the militaries secret source for chaff.
I don't think people understand that wars are fought by disruption of supply chains mainly China would know where US military supplies are made and these would be primary targets at outset of war.
If things are obscured it's generally the military industrial complex.
My initial thought was "chaff", which is released from airborne vehicles to confuse the radar of attackers. However, I looked it up, and, though it used to be particles of foil, modern chaff is made of glass fibres. Dang.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)#Modern_chaff
IMO one possible hole with this is that AFAIK chaff dusts are not as small as glitters?
My first thought is cosmetics. There's lots of shimmering 'glow' makeup out there. I'm not sure if the microbead legislation would prevent their use, but as you pointed out, maybe it's illegally included (unlikely, considering if exposed it could bankrupt the companies) or more likely, it's exported to countries that don't have these environmental protections.
If it is indeed something used for defense, the security clearance requirements mean that if something - no matter how mundane - is classified as a secret, it's a federal offense to disclose the information and it's not a good idea to even tiptoe around it - especially to the New York Times. At a minimum it could mean losing their juicy government contract and being banned from future ones.
She mentioned she couldn't even mention the industry involved, which could lead one to believe it's an industry controlled by a handful of commercial interests and would therefore 'out' those individual companies. Many companies have disclosure agreements with their suppliers to prevent industrial espionage. Given the fact that glitter has so many niche uses, I assume some of those companies would prefer their competitors not know who their supplier is, especially if that supplier is manufacturing a proprietary formula.
makeup here doesnt exactly make sense, since its usage isnt exactly a secret (nail polish, balm, etc). defence makes sense, but again, cant see how it protects the integrity of the product to know otherwise.
It's used in KFC as secret ingredient
There definitely is a lot of glitter used in the cosmetics industry, but based on my own experience, I would say the majority of “shimmery” products use mica - supposedly. At least that’s what’s on the ingredient list. 👀👀
Also, related fun fact/life tip, if you are in a situation where you want to put glitter on your face, do not use regular glitter - the glittery stuff marketed as makeup is supposed to be “cosmetics grade”, meaning the edges of the glitter pieces are less sharp. Regular glitter can scratch your corneas.
ITS CHAFF for distracting anti-aircraft missiles - lets be real - that's what it is
I "know" this cos some boat flairs have radar reflector in them to help them find you and that is glitter
@JosephTheRocker makeup does actually make sense. There's been a been informative push about how dangerous it is to have glitter used in makeup that goes around your eyes. Certain shapes and thicknesses can cut your cornea and leave you permanently blind, or cause infections, or just leave partial blindness. So now, something called "eye safe" glitter is being used, but if you ask experts (ophthalmologists), NO glitter is safe. Mica is what is being said to be mostly used, but with some formulas you can still see micro glitter in them, and it's not being advertised as such. It's a whole big thing (especially when you also bring in ethically sourced/synthetic mica, but that's a whole other topic). I haven't even touched on glitter in lipstick and how "safe" that is to ingest. Or how it's even used in some skincare. So yeah, beauty is an industry that brings in billions every year, worldwide, and it impacts every person on humanity's totem pole.
I have been Frantically trying to tell people about the hazards of glitter for years, nobody ever takes me seriously.
It really is the dullest of whines!
Seriously, it seems silly, but it is actually important to use a respirator when working with fine grained glitter. Not so much the chunky craft stuff, but the kind that is used for mix-ins for various paints and epoxy materials is a health hazard. It can get airborne and cause all sorts of issues with prolonged exposure.
This is also true of sanding practically any material. It seems like overkill, but the health risks are finally getting noticed, and the few studies on the matter that have come out are kinda terrifying. It is too fine for a simple dust mask, you need a legit well-fitted mask to capture that stuff.
@@CaedenV
That's true for essentially everything that gets mixed up with the air. Vulcanic ash, flour, wood filings...
Maybe it's all the glitter you wear?
It's just logical.
I asked an AI chatbot about this on a lark, and its answer was the cosmetics industry. It made absolute sense to me. Small enough glitter would give a luster without being discernable as glitter, and it would definitely benefit companies to keep it a secret. It has the same problem as toothpaste, being that it would be illegal, so it's pretty shaky.
Thats not a secret everyone knows that. It has to do with military
I just watched a documentary on glitter called "the end lf glitter conspiracy" by CHUPPL
Can't believe they risked their lives to collect data from the sites
Or food
I mean, there's ways to launder your paperwork I'm sure. If nobody tells then who can get in trouble? :) It's only illegal if you get caught.
I feel like passively inhaling glitter dust is 100x worst than smoking lol.
At least you leave behind a sparkly corpse.
@@audiodead7302hundreds or thousands of years from now archaeologists are going to dig up so many glittery remains that they will be convinced there was an entire culture/civilization of "exotic dancers". LOL! 😂😂😂
*worse than
That's debatable. On the one hand, glitter is plastic and metal, maybe some germs. On the other, cigarettes include thousands of toxic chemicals and particulates. Vaping is basically the same as inhaling glitter, what with its micro-shrapnel.
I remember the case of a kid who accidentally inhaled glitter and had lots of tiny flakes lodged in his lungs. The poor guy agonized for a month and there was nothing that the doctors could do, except try to ease his pain and wait for a miracle. I thought Joe would talk about stuff like that in this video.
so you're saying strippers work in hazardous conditions
It's definitely gel coat/marine paint. Companies that produce this type of paint are incredibly secretive about there formulations and the markup charged for metallic and pearlescent pigments is truly insane.
I would argue its a supplier for auto and boat paints.
My thinking on what she said is that the industry is supposed to be producing a high quality product and instead is using a cheap addition or alternative, marine paint doesn’t make sense for that, because your not going to think that the paint isn’t high quality because it has glitter, but quarts is a high quality material, so quarts makes a lot of sense
@@samueljohnston9639quartz*
quarts is an imperial unit of volume
My main problem with the boat answer is there's no way the marine industry is a bigger user of glitter paint than the automotive industry.
@@jgulner there is a lot more larger boats, yacht and ships hell the cruise ship market alone might cover a significant part of the automotive industry in terms of paint
but yeah not sure they would fit the bill for keeping it secret i'm more on the chaff or quarts cruise
If nobody else is going to do it I will...
Thank you for this episode Joe. It sparkled with mystery and intrigue.
~snort~ Nice.
(slow clap...)
Heh
One clap achievement award 🥇
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to sparklemotion.
I used to be a custodian that had, among my other duties, to clean some children's classrooms. I always dreaded when they would use glitter. It never failed, I would be finding glitter everywhere for weeks after cleaning glitter from the kids classrooms. One time I finished up the night covered in glitter. My coworkers laughed their asses off, and I started to describe it as looking like I was mauled by a stripper.
Honestly what makes the most sense to me is paper currency. i cant see a more practical use of the product with an equally important emphasis on obscurity. In that interview, that person was totally comfortable talking about how there's one company who buys a majority of the glitter, and will give away all the info but the buyer themself. the US govt. makes sense here.
Don't know about the US but I had a friend who is working in the federal printing office.
He can talk briefly about the security implemented in currency but obviously can't say what exactly is used, because it's classified government data.
But I think this is the most plausible answer, sure everyone knows that there IS security build into it. But that's about it.
Same for nuclear warheads. Everyone knows (theoretically) how it works but if you are involved (even in the slightest) in the process, you better keep your mouth shut, because the company will loose the contract. And you'll propably go to prison for treason.
This makes sense to me. Even North Korean super notes can be identified as fake somehow, might one certain type of glitter in the paper be one of the distinguishing factors?
@@Kremit_the_Forg Is this your way of informing us that glitter is a secret ingredient in "fogbank"? The NNSA wants to know your location lol.
I was think along the same lines...
This is what i was thinking, too. The spakly denomination on each and every bill printed would certainly use a large amount of glitter. It would have to be very specificly manufactured and specifications kept very secret.
In 2011 the answer was: New York City sidewalks. I had a room-mate who was a member of the MIT media lab who attended a talk on glitter in fabrication and partied with the speaker who let this gem slip.
Why? It functions as a flexible aggregate that adds tensile strength and increases heat disapation to inhibit cracking.
lol, they are trying coffee grounds
I remember the Micro Beads thing not that long ago. I actually got some when my mother mistook this face scrubber stuff as hand lotion. It felt really gritty. It was loaded with micro plastics and banned a little later. This crap was just being washed down the drain. It makes you wonder what the heck they were thinking. Well, they were thinking of profits and not of responsibility.
Yea that was some sick lapse of judgement from their part.
They probably poisoned people they loved for profit.
The worst thing I heard in this episode is the glitter in animal food. Just use fluorescent dyes. Not nearly as damaging as aluminum straight into the stomach.
In Australia there was a body gel that used sand
Im not even sure if they are even allowed to do that anymore
I loved that stuff, but I always assumed it was something biodegradable. Like they did some process on the soap which caused it to harden, then crushed it up and put it in the liquid soap. When I learned it was micro-plastics I felt insanely guilty. That's what I get for trusting corporations to not put dangerous crap in their products. I also live in the country, and have a septic field. I'm curious if there's just a thin slab of melted plastic under the ground in my back yard. heh... I mean at least it's not choking fishies.
sand seems fine to me. it's not great for your drain and gas traps and things, but it's not any worse than sand anywhere else.
@@ItsJustMe0585They advertised it as biodegradable.
It was one of those technically correct things.
Those microbeads were made out of a biopolymer. Plastic made out of plants. That doesn't really make it much different than all the other plastics though.
And it's degradable, sure it degrades into much more toxic compounds, that "turn the frogs gay".
Therefore "biodegradable TM".
My theory: Her being so secretive about it has a few thousand people talking about it and the company that she works for! Unexpectedly GREAT video Joe!
it's for painting McGuffins
@@elgorrion52
My mind went straight to bass boats
I worked for a company that made "engineered quartz" countertops. LG Hausey to be specific and everything about the process was very hush so I could def see that. Glitter was def a huge part of the mold especially for the darker countertops. They were marketed as engineered quartz and maybe it was obvious to me because I worked most aspects of the process but it was definitely noticable that they were little pieces of glitter and not real mica or w/e but I could def see why they wouldn't want it getting out to the customers since it might make the product seem "cheap".
interesting...
At the very least don't get counter tops with the fake marbling printed on. It's so cheesy.
Im pretty sure my “granite” countertop is glitter-born after watching this
@@kathleenyes-cp2uf You can tell engineered quartz from real granite or marble countertops by looking at the relfection. If you see lots of pores and small cracks its likely real granite or stone (which is why ur suppose to reseal them every once in a while to avoid mold etc) while EQ will be almost completely smooth and doesnt ever require sealing.
@@rdlinatlmanufactured "quartz" counters are also very susceptible to heat. Whereas granite can basically handle anything. (I think I read somewhere that it can get stains and scorch marks but it doesn't hurt the integrity of the stone anyway. And I never had any problems putting hot pans on real granite.)
Chaff was the first thing that came to mind. A single contractor will get credit as being "the" supplier of a weapon/countermeasures system, even if all they do is final assembly of sub components. For example, there's at least a couple dozen suppliers contracted by Electric Boat, who then does final assembly of certain military watercraft, but EB is the listed as the sole supplier.
Thought the same thing
Yeap! So much so that I just made text search on the comments ... and came across your comment :P
That's my guess
It’s not chaff. It’s way too small to scatter radar waves (aka ~10cm wavelength for guidance, meters for search radar). Maximum scattering occurs with stuff around the same size as the wavelength. For things less than the size of the wavelength, they are invisible.
@@slickbillwilly the inventor of glitters son said it's chaff. Military is biggest customer.
*I WAS ONCE ON MDMA* on a bright sunny day - I walked around the corner and some kids had dropped a whole packet of glitter on the pavement - *WOWOWOWOWOWOOWOWO*
It was an astonishing experience - I was stuck there for about 3 hours
I'm rolling. Thanks for the laugh! 😂
@@Gretch_K - Im not making it up - people kept asking if I was ok, was I having a medical incident. Eventually, the sun went behind a cloud and I could leave.
@@piccalillipit9211Imagine if you had about 200 mushrooms 😂
@@Vile_Entity_3545 - Ive never had shrooms. I want some but I live in Bulgaria now and I dont trust people to be selling the right shrooms
Please don’t ever take any hallucinogens by yourself. Please always have a sober person to be with you. If hallucinogens have any chance of being legalized, people need to treat them responsibly. Thank you for your attention.
I hate glitter, and I hate companies who are keeping secrets even more! It’s almost always bad for people or the environment when they do!
It's funny that you added the quartz countertop industry in there after the fact. My first thought was, 'I bet it's the countertop and tile business' because that's exactly what I use to make "natural" looking stone resin pours & wouldn't be surprised at all to find out they do it even with the real deal because natural stone isn't that sparkly no matter how much you polish it. If it aint them, it's definitely the makeup industry.
The makeup industry is totally upfront about things being full of glitter
Quartz is marketed as a manmade material, so I don't think anyone would be surprised it has glitter in it.
Nope, they use bismuth for that effect. Found that out in science class due to an odd combination of ditzy classmates and a "well let's find out!" science teacher. RIP Mr. Stewart, you were a beacon of light.
As a carpenter. Glitter in countertops and tiles is not a secret at all. Even the custom epoxy countertops are made with glitter. Like it's not some big secret in the construction world. Some products have glitter in it.
Something can be an open secret inside a trade and be totally unknown outside it. To the professional is common knowledge, the rest don't ask. Creating a knowledge devide.
As said they might not want the expensive tabletop to be associated with cheap glitter.
If you really wanted to know just track the cars leaving glittorex. You'll know soon enough.
i thought the point was that it's quartz, like people pay a lot of money to get the shiny rock, and they wouldn't pay so much if they knew that the shininess comes from simple glitter
I absolutely despise it. Every time I look at my black stone countertop, I think it's dirty because the glitter in it sparkles and looks like dust or crumbs or something. 😒
@@wa5657 If that were the case, they'd be committing fraud, and the glitter company would be complicit in the crime by knowingly abetting them. That's not likely to be it.
I was a munitions guy. I worked with chaff and flare daily. From the chaff I saw and had the misfortune of dumping onto myself/work tables, I never saw anything resembling glitter. It usually resembled fiberglass.
Given various sizes of glitter it could probably work but the fibers allow vastly different sizes where square pieces of glitter wouldn't fit in a tube nearly as well.
I have quartz countertops and can believe that 100
The Endless Thread podcast did a deep dive on this and called tons of representatives in tons of industries, and basically figured out that it's boat paint that is the biggest customer. That one boat paint manufacturer that made coatings for bass boats were buying 10, 30 gallon drums of glitter a week. And that was just one company. Across the industry it'd be thousands of barrels a year.
Yes! I have no idea what podcast youre talking about, but I also heard this story somewhere!
The fact that the person being interviewed was so nonchalant about this tells me that it's not as big a deal as we think it is. She's all like "You'll never guess it." and "You'd see something all right." If this really was a serious secret, she wouldn't be allowed to say anything about it. Maybe she would have just lied and said, "Well, gee. I'm not sure who our biggest client is. I guess I've never thought about it."
Agreed, this is probably just a default attitude of an employee who signed many NDAs. She doesn't quite remember what was in all those NDA she signed and her company signed, so she rather doesn't say. But at the same time, she's not worried very much, because it is unlikely that anyone would really mind and sue.
For sure. I have family that we learned decades later were big secret holders and back when the secrets actually mattered they would straight up lie if we got anywhere near it. You're not gonna dig too deep if you don't know there's anything to dig for
Chemtrails
Agree, and quarts counter tops makes sense to, they don't want people to know its looks good because of glitter in it.
Chaff could make sense but you mentioned plastic fiber with aluminium who would probably spread out more than rolls of glitter.
Yeah. It's like the secret ingredient of the Krabby Patty, there isn't one, it's just marketing. This keeps people talking about it and keeps it in the media, its free advertising.
This is now one of my top five favorite episodes on your channel. Who makes glitter, who is the largest user of glitter, and why are they secretive about it? These are things I have never pondered and now, because of you, I have an overwhelming desire to know more!
My guess is It's for weapons.
Either propulsion and/or "thermite".
Just add a little iron oxide.
Vapor deposited aluminum's going to have a lot of surface area and burn really really quick. And the backing doesn't have to be boring PET, can you can use something really fun like cellulose nitrate.
I'm thinking instead of chaff they might be making flairs and incendiary munitions.
@@jtjames79 I'd been thinking chaff as where most of it goes, but you've got a solid point there. Either way, military use would be a solid reason why they're being secretive about it.
@@Razmoudah Funny twist would be if the MOAB is actually a glitter bomb.
Thermobaric weapons were inspired by grain explosions.
I imagine finely powdered weaponized glitter could be a lot easier to properly disperse than a liquid or a gas.
@jtjames79 A somewhat frightening thought, but it would certainly work well. Mix in the right amounts of other micro-scale materials to modify the blast power and burning temperature and you could even potentially have mission specific variations that all rely on the same primary material. Damned, now I'm seeing it as a highly effective use and being rather practical.....now I just need to keep that from mixing with images of the Doki Gurlz from Behold: Humanity!
@@Razmoudah I've always had a frightening ability to MacGyver "energetic combustion" from random materials.
Do a search for "fire piston" for the ultimate primitive blasting cap, I mean "fire starter".
The chaff I knew about, the quartz countertops, that sounds plausible, and I hadn't considered it. Plus, countertop makers really wouldn't want to hype that they weren't using 100% stone for your countertops. The reflective paint and road signs I know is not glitter, it's made of retroreflective materials produced by 3M - and their patent hasn't expired yet. It's basically glass beads for the road paint. They use something else for the signs but it's not glitter.
and people are getting sick from cutting and working with its dust
Faux "authentic" materials, that would seriously cut into your bottom line if people found out you were lying to them
Signs are similar to glitter, at least in the forming process but is rows upon rows of cube corners
Personal vote: Food Packaging. The particle size isn't small (aka 1 wrapper = 1 particle) but think about how many packages you open up that seem "Foil lined". The same material used to make glitter can be cut larger to make food packaging. The fact that the primary material is still a plastic means that light heat can seal joints while still leaving an aluminum layer as a visible barrier.
For comparison: Automotive paint. Takes about 3 gallons of paint per car, of which maybe all of 2.5 grams of metal flake (glitter) is added. One box of pop-tarts (4x packages of 2 tarts per box) has enough aluminized plastic to paint a car.
Seals on your peanut butter or ketchup, layer of glitter glued to a backing material. Plastic can of coffee? sealed with glitter...
Glitter become one of my phobias since Ive read the story of a kid who accidentally inhaled a bunch of glitter and died a few days later from aphixiation. Apparently, the glitter cloggled the alveoli in the kid's lungs, producing a long agonizing death. Nope.
So u mean I can't eat glitter no more 😢 damn
wtf that's horrific
@@Snp2024No , it just means that the limit is "a bunch".
@@madrandomize5115thanks u just saved my dinner
I would imagine he would've died either from fluid build up or infection. You'd have to inhale A LOT of glitter to completely cover enough alveoli to asphyxiate you...not to mention over a period of days. I imagine they'd do surgery and blow jets of air into the lungs to sweep as much out as possible, or there's at least something they could do other than just sit there and watch him die.
Either that or it just sounds like an urban legend. I'm not buying it. That being said, I could definitely see the kid getting pneumonia due to fluid build up/inflammation that could definitely do some damage/kill him over a period of days.
The fact that glitter isn't illegal worldwide is insane considering the (micro)plastic problem. Then again, there is a lot of profit involved and when profit is involved the greater good is something that gets in the way. In general I believe there should be significantly more transparency in business we have seen that they can't behave themselves without it. Who knows, maybe one day we will be a society with a real democracy... until then it's the rich that make the laws not the people.
money talks.
If you really wanted to do something about microplastic, you'd also have to ban all clothing made from artificial fibers.
I can imagine if somebody tried to ban glitter, the glitter industry would point to this and demand equal treatment. And no politician would dare trying to ban plastic clothing.
Of course all of those things need to be banned, and probably many more. But the political will is not there.
@@johannageisel5390definitely need to ban certain types of clothing and fabrics. In Europe you can get a filter for your washer draining to filter micro plastics but I don’t live in Europe. Hopefully there will be something in the USA for that soon.
I could see glitter easily becoming so polarized and Republicans talking about how Democrats are trying to take your glitter and ruin your kids’ birthdays. And then they’ll ask, “what’s next? Fireworks?!” And we’ll say yeah, probably that would be good to get rid of too. And then the Republicans will say that if you don’t like glitter and fireworks you’re not patriotic, so dumb people will start lighting off fireworks more than ever before trying to make a stand. And then the planet will be fucked more than it already is. Oh my gawd. That’s actually exactly what would happen. I’m horrified by how accurate this probably is.
wait... iswear i saw a video about this somewhere else and i cant remember who made the video. the conclusion of that video was the boating industry
If you think the environmental issues surrounding glitter are bad check out the textile industry because that's way way waaaay worse.
There's tiny micro plastic fibers in most of our clothes. The overwhelming majority of carpeting in people's homes are 100% tiny plastic fibers that shed and get tracked out into the environment and get thrown out when they're old and worn.
And the manufacturing process for textiles can be dirty and hard on the environment too.
Yeah, I'm not saying glitter is okay but if I could only clean up one industry at a time I'd tackle textiles first (not that we can't do more than one thing at a time).
The thing is people love stretchy clothes so...
Quartz countertops was literally my first thought, because we just got those in my home and they sparkle sooo much. Glad to see I may have had my hunch down
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
@@SongSteel Do you have a link or any proof?
Quartz has mica in it. They crush it and use it in a lot of pigments for makeup etc
My money is on 'it isn't a secret, their biggest customer just doesn't want their name associated with anyone or anything else'. When they were asked who it was, the responded just gave a 'it's top secret' as a joke.
If I had to guess, it's probably some other glitter company that has some obscure patent that they are lending to GlitterX, GlitterX makes it and sells it to that company at a markup, and that company marks it up again for their bottom line. The other company doesn't want 1- to be associated, and 2- to have another investigative avenue to latch on to.
This is a very clever answer. I'm leaning on this or something very like it being the answer because real life is more often banal than titillating.
My best guess is the biggest customer of GlitterX is the US Military, not only chaft and stuff like that, but also as far as I am aware certain types of glitter can be used in automotive paints like mentioned; for stealth reasons like stealth planes and jets, when painted with certain secret formulas and techniques the paints refract light, radar and etc making the planes, jets, submarines or etc harder to detect or invisible to radar in general.
I remember hearing about this first in some documentary that was discussing the stealth fighter plane (the black triangle looking one) developed in Area 51 before it got too well-known as a centre for conspiracies. In the documentary they mentioned using a specially designed secret paint that when used not only refracted light in a certain way to achieve the goal of stealth but also it was noted it was designed to increase the surface area drastically by adding micro triangles across the area to stop the radar waves instead of reflecting them back, if I remember correctly it was so the waves would bounce into the triangles and instead of being able to bounce back out they would just bounce back and forth between the triangles until they lost all of there potential energy.
I agree with your theory, i have done research into different effects you can get from automotive glitter paint and some sources talk about using very thin layers and up to 50 coats to achieve the desired color shifting effects. Yknow like those pearlescent colored cars that look dark green from one angle but have an orange reflection from another angle. Theres no telling what other effects could be achieved if you used more coats or different sized particles. The only hole i can think of in the theory is how many planes does the us military have in their fleet? Does it really take more glitter to paint these aircraft then any other client would use? Perhaps they are the biggest client because they use glitter for a multitude of things.
Thats exactly what i was thinking
It’s most logical explanation. The military uses almost every type of product known to mankind.
I agree I think you’re right
Actually, glitter makes every surface reflect, not absorb! That’s why it’s good to be chaff - chaff clouds redirect attention from the actual threat, challenging ‘traditional’ discrimination techniques.
I used to work at a commercial screen printing company, we didn't print t-shirts, it was a lot of large size banners, window clings for fast food stores, in-store display graphics and specialty items. We could use a really coarse mesh screen and print glitter. Yuck! We did a huge order of Christmas graphics once, it took several weeks. There was glitter everywhere, there was glitter on the cooler handles of a convenience store up the road, glitter in our homes, argh. There was a flood that drowned the print shop a couple of years later and afterwards when cleaning up the mess we still found glitter. Glitter is a harbinger of the end times I tell you.
I don’t doubt it!
😂 I love that Joe is still looking at theories AFTER the episode is done. He's just as interested as we are maybe ♡
He stopped researching but Google just kept suggesting. Joe is going to be glitter-bombed by Google for weeks. Or months.
More interested… He made a whole video on it 😂
As a kid I toured an IBM vinyl manufacturing facility and they were extremely secretive; wouldn't tell us who ANY of their clients were. I think that's just how manufacturers are -- maybe they don't want competitors offering their clients a deal to switch factories, or they don't want to be liable for any manufacturing errors. DoD does make the most sense to me though -- I could see not naming an actual client company if it was countertops, but she could have named the industry as a whole pretty safely.
IBM is one of our largest defense contractors. That’s why. Nuclear Missile Defense and Super Computing/Radar.
@@EriclearnstosingIt's not just that. I worked at IBM for over twenty years, and it was always a big thing when a customer had agreed to be listed as a reference customer.
Chaff was my first thought too. And there would be a good reason to keep it on the low, because if you can manage to get the exact properties of the chaff, there is a possibility to work around it.
Yep, was my initial thought as well, military contracts wouldn't be to chuffed with you blabbing away about details.
I remember the article in the NYT. The security at Glitterex far surpassed anything I expected for a company whose main business would be Michael's and elementary schools.
My thought was chaff and the radar diffusing paint/coating on stealth fighters like the F-35. The coatings are proprietary, expensive, require special skills to apply and can only be applied by the company at their factory. I don't even know if they can be applied in the field or by nations that have bought the fighters. Exterior parts that lose their coating are sent to the factory to get reapplied every couple of flights.
True, but it's still no secret that glitter, or glitter like material, is used in chaff and diffusion paints. The exact specifications would be secret and would explain the security measures inside the factory, but that that use still wouldn't explain the volume of being the "single largest" customer. Consumer automotive paint, which also uses glitter like material openly but in proprietary formulas, would presumably far exceed what any military could use. Though this still would't meet the parameter of not being able to admit to it's use in that application. I think the "Quarts" building products have the win, knowing this makes them sound cheaper and less appealing so simple use would be a secret and would also explain volume.
Chaff is alluminum coated glass, not plastic.
And as @ckl9390 pointed out, the military isn't exactly building hundreds of thousands of planes every year. The counter top, automotive, and marine industries each dwarf the military in terms of product sales (not going by inflated technology driven prices of military spending).
@@holdintheaces7468 the military is constantly repainting.
I worked at a craft store and we already were getting ready for Christmas in August so we would be covered on green, red, silver, white, and similar color glitters every day. It was like each ornament and floral pick had a whole container of glitter on it but only a few drops of glue. Anyone who I know who worked with glitter hates it
Our product prep area is a glitter zone once holiday product rolls in. It lingers. Makes me wonder what the factories in China look like all year. And how healthy are the people working there?
I'm surprised you didn't even mention the video by the youtube channel "CHUPPL" where they tracked down and interviewed the son of the inventor of glitter. It turns out glitter companies are actually precision cutting companies first and glitter companies second. If you're interested in this mystery in any way at all you should definitely watch that video, it's probably the closest you'll get to a definitive answer
yeah massive oversight...
Yeah pretty weird he didn’t even mention it
My first thought as well
Did you all even watch the video...? He DID mention that glitter was invented my mistake, as a "byproduct" of the company that precision cut photo paper, and made synthetic "snow"... What else is there to add by referencing, and redirecting people's attention off to someone else's UA-cam channel? Umm... nothing. I think that Joe did a great job highlighting the mystery. Well... other than NOT actually solving it... but, I guess no one else has either. So, there's that.
@@SuperiorInk Yeah but that was not even close to what the inventor of glitter had to say in the other video
i literallyl have not stopped thinking about this article since I read it
I used to work inside sales at a countertop wholesaler and the majority of what went into these countertops (at least our brands, which were made in China) are crushed stone, crushed quartz, resin and dyes. Most of the more sparkly variants are sparkly due to mirror and glass chunks. Also, these days, most of the more popular colors people are building with have no sparkle anymore as the trends are changing towards marble look-alikes.
Yes I have thought about glitter. I do it each time I encounter it. It's literally microplastic pollution which doesn't serve any other solid purpose for most people
It's like Facebook. 1% utility, 99% harm, 0% responsibility.
It's much more secretive than you can imagine. The glitter is used as a feed additive in clandestine unicorn farms. It's required to ensure consistent rainbow farts.
Good one
I wanted to come up with something silly luke this but you surpassed my own ideas
Butt Stallion: the hero we deserve
🏆
This is really the only possible explanation
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my mother told me it was pieces of glass (I cringe when I see eye shadow with glitter). I don't know if that was true, but I still never get it near my face. 😊
How did you miss the guys that ACTUALLY interviewed the son of the inventor of glitter? (or something like that)
That's by far the best video about this topic 😢
Confirms EVERY theory and says that the government/military are the biggest client. That the useful part of this company is the PRECISSION METAL CUTTING.
Precision needs the action of precise spelling.(feel free to punish me harshly for my pun)🐱
@@boogieknee3781 ah va va entonces hablemos en mi propio idioma, supongo que tu ortografía ha de ser perfecta en español también.
Oye ¿vas a añadir algo a mi comentario? ¿O solo estás molestando?
That's not strictly a pun 😬@@boogieknee3781
So precisely cutting the chaff pieces to resonate with different radar frequencies? Or maybe even the secret ingredients in Stealth plane paint?
that video did nothing to answer it. he flat out said the chaff isnt glitter and homeboy went “so its just glitter”
I didn't know there was a Glitter industrial complex.
The quartz theory sounds 'bout right. Customers would definitely be irritated to find out that the luxurious, quarts counter tops they just had installed in their home are on par with the ones in their 7 year old daughters Barbie Townhouse. 😂 I know its just a small percentage being used in the manufacturing process but I can still see a lot of folks making a stink over it. So it would probably be something that all involved would rather keep quiet about.
Also, if I got a stone countertop, I would want to be preparing food right on it. Knives, dough, scraping plates... THere's gonna be even more microplastics n my food than usual!
@@PanthereaLeonis See, just another even better reason for the manufacturer to keep it hush-hush. You're exactly right.
Quartz countertops is a strong theory, but unfortunately it's incorrect. The largest buyer of glitter has been shown to (most likely) be the government, the Department of Defense.
@@PanthereaLeonisStone countertops can get stained. You wouldn’t want to be preparing food right on it.
It's called dusting , a tracking system! Used in highly sensitive indoor areas to track personnel location.
The sad part about the glitter industry is the fact that the glitter can get into your tissues and cause cancer😮
First, what does "biggest client" mean? The client who buys the most? The one who pays the most? The one for whom glitter, or a specific type of glitter, is most important? The client for whom they spend the most time on manufacturing to the most demanding specifications? My thought is that glitter is going into something these days that we've NEVER been allowed to know the real formula for: paper money.
I don't even understand why paper money is still used so widely when polymer banknotes have so many advantages
No the key is that people think about this the wrong way, the biggest customer of the biggest glitter company, no one ever said they are buying glitter from them. What the biggest customer is getting from them is the excess to some of the best precision cutting equipment. One of the companies that first invented Glitter was contracted by the US government long before it invented Glitter, at the time they were known for being extremely precise with cutting stuff and they worked on the Manhattan Project
@@marvinvogtde nope, that doesn't line up with what the employee said in the interview. "they don't want people to know it's glitter" and "you would see something"
@@marvinvogtde That's really interesting. And what are they doing with the precision cutting equipment?
@@marvinvogtdeThe glitter industry might have been at the forefront of precision machining at one time. But there are so many industrial applications with more exacting requirements now that I’m certain they aren’t anymore.
Chaff was the first thing I thought of. Russia also uses it in their nuclear weapons in an effort to defeat the United States' missile shield and radar systems. That, in itself, wouldn't make up much volume of glitter, but it's definitely something the company wouldn't want you to know about, and if you combine it with all the other uses of chaff, it adds up and is definitely something that would give the company a bad rep if the general public knew.
There is zero reason to keep that secret, it doesn't fit the requirements. How does that give you a "bad rep" what are you talking about?
@@gavinjenkins899 How does it not fit the requirement?
@@MrLunithy I just said... because of there being zero motivation for secrecy in that use case. There needs to be one to fit the story.
@@gavinjenkins899 Did you watch the video its a secret, like operation window and the later experiments in Halifax bombers that my grandfather flew so I see plenty of reasons to motivate secrecy pertaining to radar jamming.
@@MrLunithy Yes, I did watch the video, the fact it's stated as a secret in the video is WHY this is a dumb explanation. Because it makes no sense for this to be secretive if this was the client. You just saying it does 15 times doesn't make it make sense. You've given no actual reason why you think this would be secretive.
Aerospace primer coats are chromate based when used for military applications as an oxidation inhibitor. It’s the green coat on almost every airplane that gets sprayed. I have to file applications with the California Air Resources Board every time someone wants to spray the stuff. They also have a copper based formula used in space applications for shielding. Both spray on like standard paint and have to be pre-mixed using that type of metal flake (glitter). 50lb bags of it at a time. ❤
Mountain bike tubeless tire sealant uses glitter as one of the main components to help clog up punctures. Most people are unaware of this, and the material is usually dressed up in all sorts of fancy marketing terms rather than "we put glitter in there".
The secrecy bit made me immediately think of the food industry. Considering how many people already freak out about any kind of additives, and the huge potential for lost marketshare, it makes the most sense to me.
I was too! Until the counter top theory. My dad builds houses and people are very appearance and "high class look" stuck up! It would kill the trend of "granite" counter tops.
Except for the comment, "Oh, you will see it..." implying it's easily visible as to where the glitter is used. I'm thinking makeup. That's a *MASSIBE* market share, though the make-up industry is supposedly moving away from microplastics in make-up (not fast enough). Either that, or vehicle paint-boat & land.
@@DrachenGothik666 when was this interview? That matters in this context.
@Drachenfrau you'll see it, but won't recognize it. They spent years making food ads out of all sorts of things. Legislation passed to put a stop to that, but there's still loopholes for the amount of 'fillers' they can use. Saline added to meats to make them more juicy, added salt and sugar in absolutely everything. Want all your sugary snacks to look even more appealing and eye-catching? Glitter.
@@DrachenGothik666everyone knows glitter is in makeup tho. She said it’s in something that they don’t want people to know about and not already obvious
I think if she could guess how much controversy she would bring by refusing to answer, she would go with the second biggest client or anything really 🤷♀️
She could have just made something up and avoided all of this 😂
I think it might be North Korea! Lol! Liked your comment and agree!😊
I think the countertops and vinyl flooring, and other building materials that are shiny, really does make the most sense. We are like magpies. We love shiny things.
The tile/countertop theory and the chaff/military theory both seem so incredibly logical and plausible to me that I kinda believe both simultaneously as answers. The others I'm more iffy on or don't buy
Glad someone's finally onto Big Glitter
I've always heard glitter's biggest customer is chaff for military planes and it's a closely guarded secret how exactly it's made so others can't engineer around it for radar guided missiles
My initial thought was "chaff", which is released from airborne vehicles to confuse the radar of attackers. However, I looked it up, and, though it used to be particles of foil, modern chaff is made of glass fibres. Dang.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)#Modern_chaff
I would say it's the! food industry, making food look "fresh" "moist" something like that, or the CPU industry
The main ingredient in chemtrails.
I’m sure it’s military, for the disguise we use to blend in with the silver coloured lizard people.
"SHhhhhh.."
It's ok. For some reason they don't use UA-cam.@@arkboy3
my theory has always been shampoo etc., maybe that's not that surprising of an industry, but i've always noticed that weird super fine shimmer in various shampoo brands wondering what exactly it was. Could be a very subtle effect that makes your hair look much shinier and healthier somehow that you can't quite place, that is cheap for them. Certainly now with concerns over microplastics in our bodies and the environment, they wouldn't want people to know, but the legislation mentioned in the toothpaste argument should eliminate that theory
I've heard that the secret client is the *boating industry,* and they want to keep it secret because it's not _manly._
Everyone has known boat paint is 95% glitter forever.
Barely Social did a video on this a few years ago and this is what he concluded. Lots of fun videos over there.
@@TestyMcTesterson My spouse & I saw that video and thought this "mystery" had been put to bed a long while ago. Just this last weekend we were at the US's biggest trout fishing destination and saw so many boats. We talked about glitter being in boat, especially bass boat paint, & Barely Sociable's video. Then, this morning this video pops up. I'm betting the people at GlitterX are just like, OMG, here we go again.
It's the military, who use it as "Chaff", an anti missile countermeasure.
@@Lux_Lethal haha nice! I just found Barely Social last week and I've been listening to all of his far too small backlog the last few days. He does a great job doing very thorough investigations.
I deal with a lot of "molded quartz" counter tops and can see this being a huge user of glitter.
My first thought is that glitter manufacturers have been incentivized through the years to put a lot of resources towards r&d for various industries. They specialize in creating materials that reflect light in specific ways. So my mind goes to military uses. Maybe very specialized paint that bounces light in a way that camouflages it, even more effective chaff that they want kept secret. Anything that uses very specialized geometry for the particles, grooves in the particles, materials, cutting/manufacturing techniques, and so much more I can’t imagine. I’m sure the countertop manufacturers don’t want people knowing it’s glitter, but I feel like there’s got to be more interesting uses for a company that specializes in how light bounces off of tiny particles.
Exactly where my mind first went
But there's also the volume to consider. experimental paint for a couple dozen experimental low-radar-profile jets wouldn't be the largest single consumer of the largest manufacturer of glitter in the US. The exact refractive geometry or even admitting that they were on contract for that project would be very secretive, but it wouldn't be the single largest contract.
@@ckl9390
If you start to consider the size of the world and what it takes to manipulate the weather globally if this is such a thing, the volume would be immense.
Solar radiation management is a continuing ongoing program not experiments.
I’m not saying that glitter is 100% a part of this endeavor, I am saying that reflecting heat back into the space is the goal.
What if glitter happens to be the cheapest form of reflective material we could create at high volumes?…
The first thing I thought about was the chaff used in ECM. But radar scattering and absorbing vehicle coatings makes sense, too.
I can imagine she also might not want to reveal Gliterex’s biggest customer out of fear for a competitor poaching their marketshare.
Another sparkling new video from the colorful mind of the sparkliest guy I know, Joe Scott. Thank you for reflecting on this subject and shining new light on this scintiallting subject. I personally did not have a glimmer of an idea about any of this shiny subject.
I did nerd out on this. Ok, here’s my theory.
Pharmaceuticals/Deodorant. Why?
Aluminum chloride is used reduce sweating.
Plastic coated aluminum dropped in acids produce aluminum chloride.
Mixed with an alkali, it would produce hydrogen gas.
But aluminum hydroxide is used for gas and heartburn.
Clever!
Wouldn't the most likely reason just be that the glitter company doesn't want their competitors to know their unusual biggest customer because then they might try to poach that customer?
Like it could be anything of the things you suggest but there's no need for some deep confidentiality demand by the user but instead the glitter company just considers their client list to be a trade secret.
Heh ETA: I see you covered this at the very end right after I wrote this comment prematurely.
its probably a mixture of all possibilities at once
I like to think Glitterex was looking into branching out and finding new clients so let the conspiracy spiral out in the internet to see what other uses glitter could have
It's not that they won't name the customer by name. Of course that'd be confidential. It's that they won't even say how it's being used, generally, in what general areas.
Competition is not a concern when speaking in broad terms about the biggest users of glitter. It's implausible that any competitor big enough and competent enough go pose a threat, wouldn't already know this.
I have listened to probably three or four retellings of the story over the years. It's interesting to hear Joe's take on it.
As my daughters were growing up, I made one major discovery: a little glitter goes a long way!
I bought one of those 1000x handheld microscope from Amazon a whole ago, and one of the crazy things I found is......"glitter is EVERYWHERE"! It's all over our bodies, and it's microscopic. It's almost a touch alarming, because I presume it's in our bodies too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a good portion of the micro plastics in our bodies is glitter
You might want to look up DDT and where it is. Hell, it's even in breast milk and that crap is dangerous for your health.
I was thinking chemtrails, nano sized particles, would explain why you see it every where.
@@ce1581 There isn't any such thing. The trails you see behind aircraft are ice crystals formed by super heated exhaust causing water vapor and the altitude causing that vapor to flash freeze. I should know i'm both a pilot and repair/build aircraft.
@@ce1581 aircraft mechanic also agree with the dude who replied. Besides even if they were using glitter for “chemtrails” it would probably do more to cause rain than anything
A little pushback on the quartz countertops: the “10% additives” of quartz countertops is actually what makes them white, or grey, or black: it’s acrylic. Nothing saying it COULDNT contain glitter, but that’s what they’re referring to. Source: I worked in a home improvement store selling flooring and worked closely with the bath and kitchen department who sold countertops and cross trained a lot
Joe, I love your channel, I’ve seen every episode. Your evolving style and format keeps things fresh. Monday would simply not be the same without you.
I woukd expand to use in transportation. Think of high visibility paint, decals, and paving materials used to make the reflective stripes on the road, reflective roadsigns, traffic cones, high visibility striping on emergency vehicles, etc. We could be literally saving lives by using glitter to make stuff easier to see. The granite countertop/building material suggestion is a good one. I think they have their sparkly hands in a ton of industries.
My favorite theory is resort beach sand. Look how much prettier the sand at resorts is than the sand at most public beaches. And that would mean they were for sure washing glitter into the ocean, which I doubt they'd want people to know about.
(But the quartz theory does feel pretty legit.)
When I was in high school, I wasn’t in theater, but some of my friends were. One of them called glitter “theater herpes,” to which I said, “I thought regular herpes was theater herpes. You guys are always sleeping with each other.”
I can confirm, high school workers at theaters inter date dramatically.
Dang, now they all gotta go to the Burn Unit. 🤣
No surprise really, given how theater falls under liberal arts... with emphasis on liberal :^)
And everybody clapped.
@@LilyLovecraftit does indeed totally stretch credulity that a couple of highschoolers would make sex jokes
I feel like Hallmark has to be the biggest glitter using industry. I can't walk within 3 aisles of greeting cards without getting covered with glitter.
It's the military
One Christmas I was shopping at Michaels for ribbon. I could not find any ribbon I liked without glitter. I hate glitter just for the way it sheds, but can't be cleaned up.
IDK WHY BUT I'M SO FASCINATED ABOUT THIS TOPIC. 🤣🤣🤣 WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT CERTAINLY NOT ME!!! 😂