If your makeup or skincare shimmers, reflects light, or has any pearlescent glow quality to it, it is likely that comes from an ingredient called mica. It's commonly found in highlighters, foundations, eyeshadow, lip gloss, and even eye creams (where it's added to create the cosmetic illusion of brighter under-eye skin, but doesn't actually do anything to improve the texture of the skin).

It's also one of the most ethically complicated ingredients in the entire beauty industry. And most brands quietly hope you don't ask.

What mica is, and where does it comes from? 

Mica is a naturally occurring mineral that gives products their pearlescent shimmer. Beyond being used in the beauty industry, it is also commonly used as an insulator and thermal conductor in electronics, added to paint to improve shine, as a food additive, and many other uses. 

The majority of the world's mica comes from India and Madagascar, with about 60% coming from India - especially from two of the country's most impoverished states, Bihar and Jharkhand. In those regions alone, an estimated 22,000 children work in mica mines. In Madagascar, around 10,000 more. Some kids are as young as five. An in-depth investigation by Reuters found that roughly 70% of India's mica output comes from illegal mining.

There aren't really words for this. Little kids without protective gear, supervision or anything resembling safety crawl into handmade openings in poorly constructed, unregulated or previously abandoned mines. Searching for a mineral that will be sold up the supply chain for over $1,000 per kilogram by the time it reaches a beauty lab. The children themselves earn around 70 cents a day.

Why is "ethically sourced" mica often meaningless?

Here's the part that should make consumers angry: most beauty brands don't actually know where their mica is coming from. 

Call it plausible deniability, but what they have, in many cases, is a pinky promise - a vague vendor statement that says something like "to the best of our knowledge, no child labor is involved in this supply chain". No traceability, just a piece of paper that lets the brand wash its hands and push the problem down the supply chain, to a place where the consumer will most likely never see it. 

The supply chain itself is designed to be murky. Mica passes through layer after layer of middlemen, with mica sourced through child labor often getting re-documented as "ethically sourced" along the way (even though there might be nothing to substantiate that claim). With a vague vendor statement, many brands feel absolved - and most never do the further due diligence to find out if it's actually true, since the customers in most cases aren't aware enough of the situation to ask or look beyond the marketing message. 

A note on beauty certifications

This is also where we want to be honest about something the industry doesn't talk much about: certifications and initiatives, on their own, aren't a green checkmark. 

For example, the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI) is an industry coalition working to address child labor in mica supply chains, and their work is deeply needed. But a brand can be a member of RMI and still use unethically sourced mica. RMI is not a certifying body, and no due diligence is done, so membership doesn't actually tell you anything about a given brand's supply chain. 

The same goes for many of the labels you see across beauty: clean beauty badges, B-Corp, and more. Even in the cases when due diligence is involved, it is typically focused on specific aspects of the business - not on the underlying supply chain or the totality of the brand. Many brands participate in these programs with the best intentions, but a badge displayed does not automatically mean a brand is holistically good. Some sadly also use these labels to ethical-wash to look responsible. Brands rely on consumers not knowing what to look for or ask about. 

How can consumers evaluate ethical mica sourcing? 

Here's some practical guidance:

• Look for specific origin information. A brand that names the country, region, and perhaps even the specific mine where their mica is sourced is doing meaningfully more work than one that just says "ethically sourced". Specific is always more credible than vague. 


• Be skeptical of supplier statements without verification. "Our suppliers tell us no child labor is involved" is not the same as audited information or a brand being able to clearly state that their mica comes from a single, monitored source. Direct knowledge beats inherited, loose claims.


• Notice when brands are quiet about it. Truly ethical or wholly U.S. - or Europe-sourced mica is much more expensive than mica sourced overseas. Brands that pay for it know they paid for it, and they almost always will let you know. If you can't find any information about a brand's mica sourcing on their website, that's telling. A small metaphor that might help: if someone went through the hassle of baking an elaborate, time-consuming cake, they probably wouldn't pretend they just bought it from the grocery store. The same logic tends to apply to ethical sourcing - when brands invest in it, they will happily tell you.


• Synthetic mica is a legitimate option. Some brands choose synthetic mica (also listed as "synthetic fluorphlogopite") because it's lab-made and carries no child-labor risk. It's a valid choice - though it has its own complexities.


• Watch out for "ethical-washing". Donation to children's causes, RMI membership, B-Corp status - these can all be meaningful. They can also be a cover. A brand that funds children's organizations but doesn't actually know where its mica comes from is doing something good and still pushing the supply-chain problem out of sight. Both can be true at once. 

Where does LXMI source its mica? 

Our mica is proudly sourced directly from one supplier in Hartwell, Georgia (USA). Their mine is wholly owned and operated, with a fully integrated supply chain from start to finish - no middle men. After years, we're so pleased to finally have found one that meets our standards. Domestic mica is much more expensive than mica sourced overseas, and the gap is meaningful for a small business. We decided to absorb that cost rather than pass it to our community, so we haven't increased the price of the Goddess Glow. The traceability is priceless to us; the math has to be our problem, not yours. That choice was easy. Finding this supplier in the first place -and choosing them over other domestic options- was anything but. 

Behind the scenes: our Sophie's Choice

Some of you may remember that the Goddess Glow disappeared for several years, as our previous mica supplier (a well-vetted one that checked all the boxes for us and who we had worked with since launching the Goddess Glow) sadly went under during the pandemic. On top of the general challenges with mica sourcing, the Goddess Glow uses a compounded mica - a mica blended with other pigments that create its specific rose gold tone - which narrowed our options even further. We couldn't just swap in any mica we found; the replacement had to work within the existing formula. Reformulating an established product is a bit like a game of Jenga: every ingredient holds something else up, and pulling one piece out can quickly destabilize the whole structure. 

After a lot of work, it finally came down to two domestic options that would work in the formula. But here's where the lines got harder to draw. 

• OPTION A was vegan - but we found out the supplier was a major donor and lobbyist for anti-climate policy, working against the planet we all depend on. 
  


• OPTION B came from a supplier whose values aligned with ours on climate - but their compounded mica contained a small amount of carmine, a natural red pigment derived from an insect, which would make the product no longer vegan.

We knew that using mica potentially sourced through child labor was a non-starter, but beyond that it wasn't an easy choice. We debated internally over and over. Both vegan formulation and environmental integrity are essential to us - and now we had to decide which one came first when we couldn't have both. We could've kept Goddess Glow discontinued indefinitely, but our community has been asking for this product back for years. So we made the call to relaunch - and to be transparent about the compromise involved.

In the end, we chose the planet. Our reasoning was this: without a habitable planet, there is no future for animals, for humans, or for any of the values we hold. We couldn't, in good conscience, fund anti-climate lobbying through supplier purchases - and we wouldn't, under any circumstances, be part of funding child labor either. We hope that by the next production run, the ingredient innovation for domestic mica will have evolved further to have both vegan + values-aligned options at the formulation level we need. Until then, the current Goddess Glow formula contains a trace of carmine and is no longer vegan. The rest of our line remains fully vegan. 

What's ethical?

We completely understand that someone else might've made a different choice. Ethics and values are not black and white, and a lot of decisions come down to a set of imperfect tradeoffs. What feels acceptable to one person may not feel acceptable to another. That's not a judgment - it's just the reality of building a values-driven business in a complicated world.

Children mining mica in unsafe, unregulated conditions for pennies a day is a dirty secret the beauty industry has gotten very comfortable not talking about. Many brands have built supply chains (whether obliviously or not) that make it conveniently impossible to know whether they're part of the problem. How individual consumers respond to that reality is, of course, personal. Our job isn't to draw your line - it's to draw ours clearly, so you have the information you need to make yours. We want to serve you the way we'd want to be treated ourselves. Thank you for being the kind of community that cares. That you read this far genuinely means a lot.