Mica is one of the most common minerals used in the cosmetics industry. It’s the ingredient that makes an eyeshadow finish look metallic and a face powder feel like silk. In the industry, it is a staple because it spreads easily and reflects light, which photographs perfectly in high-definition cameras. It’s stable, cheap, and familiar to manufacturers. To most of us, it’s just another line on an ingredient list, as unremarkable as talc or silica. But that very mundane obscurity is exactly how the industry keeps its most uncomfortable realities out of sight.

Most of this mineral comes from a specific belt in Jharkhand and Bihar. In the 80s and 90s, the big, licensed Mica mines in these places were shut down due to environmental damage and labour violations. However, the mining didn't stop; it just went off the grid. Today, a massive share of Indian mica is extracted through ‘ghost mines' — illegal operations on forest land and abandoned sites. This shift pushed the extraction out of formal systems and into informal ones, where oversight is non-existent and the risk is shifted entirely onto the workers.

These setups are far from professional. They are shallow pits and hand-dug tunnels with zero protective equipment or safety inspections. It’s a system built on manual labour where families work together because the pay is so low that a single income can’t sustain a household. Scrap mica is collected, cleaned, and sold by weight to local traders. Reports from Reuters and international NGOs have documented many fatal mine collapses in these areas, including the deaths of children working alongside adults as a result of these unmonitored and unsafe practices. 

The scale of this illegal mining expanded particularly during the pandemic. When lockdowns hit, daily wage work vanished, and entire villages returned to mica collection as their only source of cash. Schools stayed closed, removing one of the few barriers keeping children out of hazardous work. For the global beauty market, demand for products rebounded quickly, meaning the industry’s recovery was fueled by people who had lost every other safety net. The pandemic may not have created these conditions, but it made them impossible to escape.

The environmental and human costs of this industry are connected to the soil itself. Because these mines are illegal, they happen on forest land where trees are cleared to reach surface deposits, destroying the soil structure and increasing erosion. Trees are cleared without a second thought, and the landscape is left scarred with open pits. Once the land is degraded, recovery is incredibly slow, and illegal operators have no obligation to either restore the sites or compensate the people living there.

During the monsoons, these open pits turn into drowning hazards for locals and livestock. But the damage goes deeper than the physical pits. The processing centres are just as destructive. Washing and sorting mica requires huge amounts of water, which is then discharged, untreated, into nearby streams. Local environmental assessments show that this runoff has decimated water quality in surrounding villages, turning a vital resource into a toxic one.

This environmental decay creates a feedback loop of poverty. As the runoff ruins agricultural land, farming becomes less productive and food security drops. This pushes families even further into mining as their only source of income. The extraction also continued because demand didn't slow down in the downstream industries. Beauty and electronics sales bounced back while conditions in the mining regions worsened. The burden of this imbalance fell on communities with no bargaining power. The pandemic revealed how dependent the global mica supply chain is on economic precarity. It’s a system that thrives when people have no other choice but to dig.

After extraction, the journey from a village in Jharkhand to a retail shelf is designed to be a game of "supply chain telephone". Once mica leaves a village, it passes through local traders and middlemen who aggregate it. By the time it reaches a processing center to be cleaned and graded, its origin is a mystery. This allows brands to claim "due diligence" while staying comfortably distant from the actual pits. It’s a structure that benefits the buyers, allowing companies to claim they aren't part of the problem without having to look too closely at their own sourcing.

At the bottom of this chain, miners are paid by weight. A family might earn a pittance for a whole day’s work, with prices fluctuating based on quality and demand. There are no contracts and no recourse when prices drop. As mica moves through the processing centers, its value increases sharply. By this stage, the mineral has been detached from the conditions of its extraction. Exporters sell it to manufacturers at prices that bear no relation to the few rupees paid to the miners.

Industry-led efforts like the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI) do exist, and they have had measurable impacts in specific villages. They focus on education and mapping mining areas. However, these initiatives struggle because the mining itself is illegal. Monitoring can only reach the operations that are willing to be monitored. For many consumers, labels like "responsibly sourced" function as a form of empty reassurance without providing the hard details. This gap between wages and final market value is the core of the problem. Brands benefit from low raw-material costs while maintaining tight control over pricing on the consumer side of things. 

Moreover, there is a specific, heavy toll on women and children in this trade. Child labour remains widespread within Mica mining because children's small frames can navigate the narrow, collapsing tunnels that adults can’t reach. Reports from Terre des hommes and Anti-Slavery International show children involved in every stage — sorting, carrying, and processing. Schools in these mining villages see high dropout rates because household survival depends on the daily collection of scrap.

The health consequences are devastating as well. Respiratory illnesses caused by mica dust are common, and healthcare access in these regions is severely limited. None of this is hidden from local authorities; yet, there’s no enforcement strong enough to disrupt the trade. 

This is a deeply gendered system. Women often take on the sorting and processing work, which is paid even less than the actual mining. Girls are the first to be pulled out of school to contribute to the household income. The irony is biting: the beauty industry spends billions on marketing ‘self-care’ and ‘empowerment’ to women, yet the raw materials for those very products are pulled from the ground by women and girls who are systematically marginalised and underpaid.

The path forward is the alternative to natural mica which is Synthetic Fluorphlogopite, or lab-grown mica. In the Indian market, brands like Earth Rhythm have been vocal about their move to synthetic mica, specifically to avoid the ethical pitfalls of the domestic mica belt. Similarly, Juicy Chemistry emphasizes a "soil-to-soul" transparency, often opting for synthetic shimmer or ECOCERT-verified minerals to ensure they aren't inadvertently funding the ghost mines of the East. These brands are responding to a growing segment of Indian consumers who are tired of the ‘gloss over’ approach to supply chains.

Our complacency with this kind of extraction is a core feature of modern capitalism. We have been conditioned to view materials as neutral, invisible inputs and not results of human labour. This is why we can see a "flash sale" on an Indian e-commerce site and buy a shimmering palette for ₹499 without asking why it’s so cheap. The fast-paced cycle of 'drops' and influencer-led trends rewards this detachment. 

History shows that this distance can be bridged when people stop acting as passive consumers and start acting as a collective force. We saw this in India with the movement against Fair & Lovely (now Glow & Lovely), which was the result of years of public pressure, petitions like 'Dark is Beautiful', and a cultural refusal to accept colourism as a marketing tool. Similarly, when Indian consumers began demanding Paraben-free or Sulphate-free products, the industry shifted because people refused to accept those chemicals as a necessary cost of hygiene. 

The same logic applies to mica. As consumers, we can move past the vague 'responsibly sourced' labels by demanding that Indian brands use synthetic alternatives or provide third-party, verified evidence of their supply chain, a practice that is becoming increasingly common within the food, health, & nutrition industry. But for that to happen, we need the awareness of where these materials actually come from; acknowledge that our consumption has a footprint, with very real impacts on the lives of those at the start of the chain.

Here's more from Homegrown:

Tribal Rights Revoked As Chhattisgarh Government Paves Way For Mining

Migrant Workers & Their Ordeals: A Photographic Depiction Of Their Struggles On A Mining Site

A 200-Metre Mural In Fort Kochi Puts Coastal Labour At The Centre Of Climate Justice