Glitter specks often end up far from party tables and greeting cards. You can even spot them glinting on beaches, washed in with the tide.

“All that glitters is not gold,” wrote William Shakespeare. And how prescient he was: Glitter today is a mix of plastic and aluminum. These sticky, scintillating specks appear in wrapping paper, ...

When 19 British pre-schools stopped using glitter in art projects to save the oceans, it set off a frenzy that reached as far as New Zealand over glitter’s potential to harm marine life. The change at ...