"I opened it, and it just exploded. I can't feel my face."
"No! Glitter gets everywhere. There is no getting rid of it when it comes out. It is a menace!"
— Madame Gazelle, Peppa Pig, "Masks"
Due to the widespread belief that Everything's Better with Sparkles, many believe that glitter should be added to anything and everything to make them look more beautiful or valuable.
However, something that many adherents to the trope refuse to acknowledge is just how difficult glitter is to clean up. Considering glitter is made of tiny particles, mainly of either aluminum and glass or plastic in modern times, it frequently falls off from items where it's applied to, and as a result adheres to surfaces where it is unwanted.
Because of this characteristic, glitter is sometimes depicted in fiction as tending to get everywhere, even and especially in places where it does not belong. Whether it be a glitter bomb setting off on a hapless prank victim or an art project gone wrong, as long as this trope is in play, glitter will end up on clean floors, on the ceiling, in one's hair, etc., and the victim can and should expect to find more glitter remnants turn up months later in the most unexpected of places.
As anyone who has used glitter in real life can attest, this is Truth in Television. Confetti may also apply, though they're larger in size by definition and not necessarily shiny like glitter.
The trope is often Played for Laughs, in which case it is a Sub-Trope of Powder Gag, but it can also be used dramatically.
Compare and contrast Everything's Better with Sparkles, where glitter is used for aesthetic reasons, and Confetti Drop, where a large amount of confetti is rained down in celebration or honour of certain individuals; those two tropes depict glitter and confetti in a more positive light while this trope leans neutral-to-negative, though there is potential overlap between those tropes and this one.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Exploited in the Hazbin Hotel fanfic A Hellish Birthday
, where Charlie is gifted glitter bombs by Cherri Bomb and sets one off by pretend accident to get out of having to eat the rotting deer carcass that Alastor prepared for her; the glitter coats everyone and everything in the room, including the deer.
"Sorry about the glitter," she said, looking remorsefully at Vaggie, who could not have been more pleased with their escape. "We'll be finding that for years. […]" - I Hope You're Prepared For An Unforgettable Wedding!: As a wedding gift, Bart gives Principal Skinner a spring-loaded glitter bomb, and Skinner ends up covered in glitter. Bart, naturally, gets sent to detention for this.
- Intergalactic Illness: Lala catches a cold and starts sneezing glitter — as in, it's not the cause of the sneeze but what she expels when sneezing. It always scatters around the floor and onto the face of whoever unfortunate soul happens to be nearby. Her arm, Prunce, and Kappard's eyes are victims. Madoka proposes she sneezes into a trash can so her cold causes less of a mess.
- In Kedabory's Muppet Mania, one of the Muppet Labs inventions is a sparkle-izer, which malfunctions and dumps glitter all over Bunsen, Beaker, and guest star Rosemary. Statler cracks a joke about calling in the Glitter Force to handle it.
- Total Drama Do Over has a Running Gag in the Halloween episode in which Sadie covers herself in glitter and keeps sneezing because of it.
- Trolling the Toad: As Part 2 of a revenge prank against Slytherins for acting out of line at their last Quidditch match, the Weasley Twins have them covered in colourful glitter at breakfast in Chapter 16, in front of the entire school, with Harry commenting that glitter really does get everywhere. That being said, the Twins take precautions to ensure no glitter ends up in anyone's eyes or respiratory tract, not wanting to cause any lasting harm or get arrested.
Literature
- In Unicorns Are The Worst, one of the goblin narrator's many complaints about unicorns is the fact that glitter is a huge pain to clean up, particularly that it's hard for him to get out of his smock. And since he seems to only have a single one, the reader is treated to seeing him wash his smock in the nude.
Live-Action TV
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In "Dillman", a glitter bomb is left on Jake's desk that not only covers everything in a yard's radius in red glitter but shatters the windows and contaminates the only evidence from an open case on his desk. Jake tries to blame Terry by pointing out a hidden pair of suspenders with red glitter on them, but Dillman deduces the glitter is not from the prank but from Terry's twin daughters. It turns out the bomb was planted by the ADA who assigned the case to Jake, hoping to blame the lack of evidence on him, exploiting the trope).
- CSI: In "Assume Nothing", square pieces of glitter are found on the bodies of a murdered married couple and later turn up on the bottom of a suspect's shoe. A member of the team ties the flecks to a specific strip club called "Shimmer", and while that doesn't prove murder, it does prove that all three had been at the same location, so they know they're on the right track.
- One episode of Forensic Files details a case where traces of glitter are used to prove the victim was in a suspect's car after she was murdered.
- Inside No. 9: Invoked in "Nana's Party". Frustrated at being yelled at by her mother Angela for messing up the living room (read: disrupting the carpet tassels in an otherwise immaculate room), when Angela asks Katie if she has signed Nana's card, Katie jokes about making her one with "lots of glitter and glue"; the prospect causes Angela to briefly freak out.
- Only Murders in the Building: Exploited. In Season 2, a glitter bomb is used in an attempt to track a suspect. The main characters miss the bomb going off but later, the glitter is seen to still be stuck on the person who set it off, allowing Mabel to identify them.
- Yellowjackets: In the present, Shauna and her former teammates try to catch their blackmailer. In the process, the guy gets covered in glitter but escapes. The next morning, Shauna finds glitter in her closet. She assumes her lover left it there (It Makes Sense in Context) when she had him hide from her husband, who was the actual blackmailer.
Music
- Save Face: Discussed in "GLITTER", a Murder Ballad, which is about the killer's desire to have the victim's blood "get stuck like glitter" on the former's face.
Video Games
- Cassette Beasts: All attacks of the "glitter" type cause the target's type to change to "glitter" for three turns, representing glitter's tendency to get everywhere. Because most attacks define their type as the user's type, this often results in every monster on the battlefield being covered in glitter.
Web Original
- Chikn Nuggit: One short features Iscream and Fwench Fwy discussing glitter. While Fwench Fwy likes glitter for how it brightens everything up, Iscream, being a Troll, admits to liking it because it can't be gotten rid of once it gets into something.
- Protectors of the Plot Continuum: In "How Will I Clean My Fur?", Steven gets hit with a prank that leaves pink glitter all over him. It sticks to him, too, because he'd previously been drenched in a strange, fictional goo.
- Welcome To The Table: Implied. In "TikTok is Banned?", New York starts asking the others if he can see their knuckles, checking for bruises, cuts, "maybe some glitter or eyeliner". This alludes to a real-life series of women who reported getting randomly sucker-punched in the face in New York City at the time the video was released (April 2024), and suggests that a person who punched someone wearing glitter would still have the incriminating evidence on their knuckles.
Western Animation
- Bob's Burgers: In "Drumforgiven", Louise Belcher plans to send a music shop owner a glitter bomb disguised as a present, as payback for banning Gene from playing with the instruments in his shop. She has to abort the plan when Gene arrives to confront the owner himself. After all has been settled, Gene sees the bomb in Louise's hands, thinks it's a present for him, and opens it, covering everyone with glitter.
- Discussed in Craig of the Creek. In the episode "Kelsey the Author", the main characters and Stacks help Kelsey pass off the book she wrote as a published official library book. When they're discovered, Craig threatens to write his own book and place it in the library and inspiring other kids to do the same; he compares this fraudulent book threat to glitter and how nigh-impossible it is to remove.
- The Loud House: In the episode "Band Together", Luna pranks several characters by hiding glitter bombs in their music cases.
- Peppa Pig: Addressed twice in Season 5, in contrast to how the children believe Everything's Better with Sparkles.
- In the episode "School Project", Suzy Sheep asks for permission to use glitter for her art project for playgroup, to which Madame Gazelle, the playgroup teacher, replies they can't use too much as it gets everywhere. Later in the episode, Peppa's parents attempt to dissuade her from incorporating glitter as a finishing touch into her art project. Predictably, one Gilligan Cut later, most of the playgroup and their parents show up with glitter all over their clothes, with similarly sparkly art projects.
- In the episode "Masks", Madame Gazelle continues to be adamantly of this belief, to the point of keeping all the glitter in the playgroup (read: a small vial of it) inside a locked vault. The glitter leak at the end of the episode ultimately spills out onto the closing credits as well as the entire classroom.
Real Life
- The costuming and arts and crafts communities frequently refer to glitter as "craft herpes" because "it stays with you for life".
- The messy nature of glitter is often exploited in the form of glitter bombs, where glitter is thrown at the target for varying reasons, mainly as an act of protest by activists or as a prank.
- In reality, glitter is a health hazard because if it enters the eyes or nose, it can cause damage to the cornea or other soft tissues, potentially irritating them or leading to infection.
- Scientists have called for a ban on glitter as it is a microplastic that can leach hormonal disruptors into the environment. Plastic glitter also takes about one thousand years to biodegrade, making it a long-lasting environmental hazard that can affect countless organisms.
- There have been criminal cases where glitter litter has been used as forensic evidence. The shape, composition, color, and other features of the glitter can and has been used as trace or contact evidence, proving a suspect was in contact with a crime scene and/or victim.
