Not all that glitters is gold. Actually, the stuff lining the bottom of your craft drawer is likely bronze — and potentially deadly.
Considering how difficult it is to clean glitter out of a rug, it’s no stretch to imagine the challenge of removing it from the lungs.
But that’s exactly the kind of task a group of doctors in Argentina was faced with when a 3-year-old girl arrived at the hospital with “respiratory distress and altered consciousness,” according to a case report published in a medical journal about poisonings.
While a family member was decorating an ornament, the unidentified girl accidentally inhaled a “large amount” of glitter dust. It also got on her skin and into her eyes, and she ingested some.
The respiratory distress and coughing she experienced were just the beginning: she also vomited and suffered abdominal pain — and parts of her skin started to turn blue.
All in all, the girl developed pretty severe subcutaneous emphysema, a rare condition stemming from air trapped under the skin, and a pneumothorax on the right side of her lung, caused by air leaking in the space between the lung and the chest wall.
Doctors treated her with antibiotics and oxygen therapy to stabilize her, and she also needed mechanical ventilation for the next seven days. She was finally discharged from the hospital a week later.
Satirical newspaper The Onion gave us a preview of these severe complications in 2005, when it published a tongue-in-cheek article about the epidemic of “glitter lung” afflicting the art teacher community.
The fictional story centers the plight of adults who are serially exposed to the crafting material, suggesting that glitter particles stay in the air in large enough quantities to do long-term damage to the organs, much like black lung in miners.
The Onion article wasn’t entirely prophetic: Dangerous toxicity takes a lot more than passive exposure to glitter — and those most at risk are young children, not adults.
Turns out that most glitter is made of crushed up bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, combined with zinc or stearin used as a binding agent. It’s a “severely toxic” substance, the doctors said, that can be fatal if ingested by children.
Copper and zinc, of course, are essential minerals that our bodies need. But in this form, they go from helpful to harmful. Copper, especially, can “generate free radicals, leading to oxidative stress-induced damage” when introduced into the body this way.
Similar cases have been reported in the last several years, including in 2024 when a 4-year-old tried to eat gold cake dust. It had been labeled “non-edible” but also “non-toxic.”
She developed a condition called metal pneumonitis, plus chronic pulmonary disease was observed in a scan of her lungs four months after she was discharged from the hospital.
The FDA, for its part, has warned against “using glitter and dust products to decorate cakes and other food items unless the products are specifically manufactured to be edible.”
In 2022, a 15-month-old was admitted to the hospital with copper poisoning from glitter ingestion. The doctors performed an immediate bronchoscopy with an accompanying bronchoalveolar lavage, a saline solution to wash out the airways, which aided in the child’s quick diagnosis and recovery.
In this most recent case involving the 3-year-old, the doctors reported that a check-up three months after the incident revealed bronchiectasis in both lung bases, a condition that can lead to recurrent respiratory infections. The child otherwise presented as relatively stable.
The doctors distinguish between the ultra-fine glitter that she inhaled and larger forms of glitter that generally may cause some coughing, but can’t be absorbed into the bloodstream in the same way.
It’s for this reason that the case report authors are calling for regulation of glitter sales, noting that the ultra-fine stuff is commonly found in paints, cosmetics and craft supplies and shouldn’t be available to kids under 14.
If the doctors get their way, craft stores everywhere might start ID’ing for sparkly DIYs.
