That shimmery glow in your sunscreen, body lotion, and lip balm almost certainly comes from mica, a naturally occurring mineral (also listed on ingredient labels as potassium aluminium silicate, or CI 77019) prized for its light-reflecting shine. From Rhode’s skin Highlight milk to Naked Sunday’s Sunscreen, to Kylie Cosmetics High Gloss, to Summer Friday’s Pool Time Glowing Body Oil – the shimmer is everywhere, but its backstory is less than lustrous.
Mica mining is illegal, unsafe, & using child labour
India supplies a large share of the world's high-grade mica, much of it dug out of forested regions in states like Jharkhand and Bihar. A significant portion of that mining happens outside any legal or regulated system, in unofficial "rat-hole" pits. These are narrow, hand-dug tunnels that workers, including children, climb into with no protective equipment. Mica extraction has technically been illegal in these areas since 1980, but enforcement has done little to stop it, largely because so many families in the region have no other reliable income.
The physical toll is significant: workers face lung disease from constant dust exposure, along with the risk of tunnel collapses and other injuries. Entire households, including children, often work the mines out of economic necessity rather than choice, which is partly why the problem has proven so difficult to simply legislate away.
What are beauty brands doing about it?
In 2017, a coalition of cosmetics companies and NGOs launched the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI) to clean up the supply chain and remove child labour from it. The original target was 2022. That deadline has since been pushed back, and by the RMI's own 2024 reporting, children still make up roughly one in ten mica workers in India. A handful of major brands, including L'Oréal and Estée Lauder, say they now enforce their own ethical sourcing standards, but independent verification across such a fragmented, informal supply chain remains genuinely difficult. Many brands seem to persist in their use of mica without addressing the major human-rights and ethical issues at all.
Some brands have sidestepped the problem altogether by switching to lab-made synthetic mica, Lush is a well-known example. It removes the direct link to mining, but it isn't a clean win either: manufacturing synthetic mica is energy-intensive, and it comes with its own carbon and industrial footprint. Swapping one supply chain issue for another isn't quite the ethical slam dunk it's often marketed as.
"Sparkle-washing"
This is where a sharper critique comes in: some journalists describe parts of the beauty industry's response as "sparkle-washing," leaning on vague sustainability language and quiet reformulations while avoiding real transparency about where and how mica is sourced. A brand can claim to be "clean" or "conscious" without disclosing its supply chain in any verifiable way, and consumers are left with little practical means of checking those claims for themselves.
Why it's a hard problem to just fix
Part of what makes this so sticky is that there's no obviously "correct" answer. Boycotting natural mica entirely could strip income from communities that depend on mining to survive, in a region with few alternative jobs. Switching wholesale to synthetic mica trades a human-rights problem for an environmental one. And industry self-regulation, like the RMI, has repeatedly missed its own targets, showing how hard it is to police a supply chain that runs through thousands of informal, hard-to-monitor mining sites.
The takeaway
The shimmer in your bathroom cabinet is a small, literal example of a much bigger pattern in global manufacturing: cheap raw materials, murky supply chains, and a burden of proof that tends to fall on journalists, researchers, and consumers rather than on the companies selling the finished product. Genuine progress probably requires more than a brand's marketing promise and requires independent, on-the-ground verification of sourcing, and real consequences when standards aren't met. But from where we stand, we won’t be putting mica in any of our products.
