Latest / The Monégasque Table / Edible Glitter vs Disco Dust: Which Ones Can You Eat?
Transcript
- Margaux: 22.1 milligrams of copper per gram of frosting. That is a real measurement, from a real cake, at a real birthday party. And the jar it came out of was labelled — accurately, in its own way — "for decoration only." Dana: I asked for this one. Last time I said there's a jar on the same shelf called disco dust, it's cheaper, and I have never trusted it. You said it's on a list the FDA publishes, which was an extremely annoying way to end an episode. Margaux: Welcome to The Monégasque Table. Today: edible glitter versus disco dust, what the names actually mean, and how a normal person standing in an aisle is supposed to tell one from the other. Dana: Start with the part I care about. Is disco dust edible or not? Margaux: Here's the answer up front, and it is not the answer you want. The name tells you nothing. Not disco dust, not luster dust, not petal dust, not any of them. There are jars sold as disco dust that are made to be eaten and jars sold as disco dust that are made to sit on a display cake and never touch a mouth, and they carry the same 2 words on the front. Dana: That cannot be legal. Margaux: It's entirely legal, because those are marketing names, not regulated categories. Nobody has to earn the right to print "disco dust" on a lid. What is regulated is the label underneath: companies that make edible glitters and dusts are required by law to include a list of ingredients. So the test isn't the name on the front. It's whether there's an ingredient list on the back and whether the word edible appears. Dana: And if it doesn't? Margaux: Then the guidance is blunt. The FDA's position is that if a label says only "non-toxic" or "for decorative purposes only" and carries no ingredient list, the product should not be used directly on foods. Not "use sparingly." Not "probably fine on the outside." Should not be used directly on foods. Dana: You said there's a list. Read me the list. Margaux: This is the part I wanted you to hear. The FDA has published advice telling home and commercial bakers to avoid using glitter and dust products on food unless the products are specifically manufactured to be edible — and then it names the aliases, because the agency knows the naming is the problem. Luster dust. Disco dust. Twinkle dust. Sparkle dust. Highlighter. Shimmer powder. Pearl dust. Petal dust. Dana: That's 8 names for what I assumed was 1 thing. Margaux: 8 names, and not one of them is a promise. That list exists because bakers kept reaching for a jar with a charming name and no ingredient panel. Dana: Okay, but hold on. Some of those names mean something to me. Luster dust is the fine one, disco dust is the chunky sparkly one. Those aren't nothing. Margaux: They're not nothing — they're descriptions of texture, and in the trade they're used fairly consistently. Fine powders in the range of roughly 5 to 25 microns give you a smooth metallic sheen; that's what people mean by luster dust. Coarser flakes, roughly 50 to 500 microns, give you visible individual sparkles that stay suspended in a liquid instead of sinking; that's the disco-dust end of the range. So the words do describe a real physical difference. Dana: Then the names aren't useless. Margaux: They're useful for predicting what it will look like. They are useless for predicting whether you can eat it. Those are 2 different questions and the aisle blurs them into one. Dana: Right. So a jar of disco dust could be a beautiful coarse edible flake, or it could be craft glitter with a nicer name. Margaux: Yes. And that is the whole episode in a sentence. Dana: Give me the bad outcome, then. Because so far this is a vocabulary problem, and I want to know if it's actually a safety problem. Margaux: It's documented, and I want to be careful about how I tell it, because this is public health literature and it is not about anybody's brand that I'm going to name. During 2018 and 2019, health departments in Rhode Island and Missouri investigated toxic metal poisonings connected to cake-decorating luster dusts. Dana: What happened in Rhode Island? Margaux: A birthday party. Six children got sick after eating cake from a local bakery. Vomiting and diarrhoea, starting somewhere between half an hour and 10 hours after they ate it, and mostly over within about 10 hours. Dana: Kids at a birthday party. That's — yeah. Go on. Margaux: The dust on that cake was a rose gold product, and when it was measured it came in at 22.1 milligrams of copper per gram of frosting. On a single slice, that works out to close to 900 milligrams of copper. Dana: I don't have any instinct for whether that's a lot. Margaux: It's a lot. And then the health department went back to the same bakery and analysed 28 other dusts on the shelf there, and found elevated aluminium, barium, chromium, copper, iron, lead, manganese, nickel and zinc across them. Dana: 28 more jars. Margaux: 28 more jars. And here is the part that matters for anybody listening, and it's the reason I'm telling this at all. Every one of those products was labelled. The rose gold dust said "nonedible." It said "nontoxic." It said "for decoration only." The Missouri case was a primrose petal dust, found during a home inspection after a child's blood lead level came back high, and that one was labelled "nontoxic" and "made in USA." Dana: So the labels were telling the truth and somebody used them anyway. Margaux: The labels were telling a partial truth in a way almost nobody parses correctly. "Nontoxic" is a word from a different world — it's the standard used for art supplies, and it means safe to handle. It does not mean safe to swallow. The report that came out of those investigations said exactly that: explicit labelling indicating that nonedible products are not safe for human consumption is needed to prevent illness and unintentional poisonings. Dana: Which is a very polite way of saying the labels weren't clear enough. Margaux: It is. And it's why this show has a rule about the word. We say edible. We don't say non-toxic. Non-toxic is what you say when you can't say edible. Dana: Alright. I've been sitting on this and now I'm taking my swing, because I think your test is weaker than you're admitting. Margaux: Take it. Dana: You told me the test is: look for an ingredient list. Fine. So I flip the jar, there's a list, I feel clever, I buy it. But you also told me — on this show, more than once — that a colour additive is cleared for specific foods and not others, with a maximum amount for each one. Which means an ingredient list can be sitting there looking honest while naming something that isn't actually cleared for the thing I'm about to put it on. So the test you just handed me doesn't prove the thing you want it to prove. It only proves somebody printed something. Margaux: That's the round you win, and you've said it better than I would have. An ingredient list is a screening check. It is not proof of compliance. A list can name a colour additive that has no clearance for that particular food, and it will look exactly as reassuring as one that does. I should have said that in the same breath as the test rather than 10 minutes later. Dana: Then what am I supposed to do? Because I'm now worse off than when I walked in. Margaux: You're not, and here's why. The ingredient list is a filter, not a verdict. It doesn't tell you a product is cleared. It tells you whether the maker is willing to say what's in it at all — and the entire documented harm we just went through came from products where the answer to that question was no. Missing information is the failure mode. In this category, more than 66 percent of ingredient-related complaints aren't about a specific ingredient somebody objects to. They're about there being no ingredient information at all. Dana: So the list doesn't clear the jar. The absence of a list condemns it. Margaux: That's the shape of it. It's a one-way test. And it works, because it's the exact thing the bad jars can't fake without lying in print. Dana: Give me the aisle version. I have a phone, a shopping basket, and about 40 seconds. Margaux: 3 things, in order. One: find the word edible on the packaging, and treat "non-toxic" as a red flag rather than a reassurance — if a maker could write edible, they would, because it sells better. Two: find the ingredient list. If there isn't one, put it down; that's not a close call. Three: read the list and see whether it looks like food. The FDA names the ingredients that are common in genuinely edible glitters and dusts — sugar, acacia, which is gum arabic, maltodextrin, cornstarch, and food-approved colour additives including mica-based pearlescent pigments and the FD&C colours. Dana: And if it's a bare jar in a craft aisle with no panel at all? Margaux: Then it's a craft product, and it's fine at being one. Nobody's saying craft glitter is a scandal. It's for the display wreath and the photo-shoot centrepiece, and it's cheaper because it doesn't carry any of the cost of being food. The failure is putting it on a cake, and the naming is what makes people do that by accident. Dana: What about the pro who wants to be really sure? Not me — the person selling cakes. Margaux: Then the label test isn't enough and they should stop pretending it is. Ask the supplier for 3 documents: the product specification, a certificate of analysis for the actual lot, and a written regulatory statement naming the food categories the product is intended for. And know that a safety data sheet is not one of those. A safety data sheet is a workplace document about handling a material — it is not evidence that something is cleared for food, and asking for it as the decisive test is a mistake I see constantly. Dana: That's the thing I'd have got wrong. I'd have asked for the safety sheet and felt thorough. Margaux: Everybody does. It has "safety" in the name. Dana: Here's what I still don't understand. Why is the decoration-only jar cheaper? It's the same amount of shiny powder in the same size pot. Where does the money go in the edible one? Margaux: Into everything that isn't the powder. A product sold for food carries the cost of knowing what's in it and being able to prove it — the specification, the testing, the documents, the fact that somebody has to answer when a health department calls. A product sold for display carries none of that, because nobody's meant to swallow it. So the gap in price isn't a gap in sparkle. It's a gap in paperwork. Dana: Which is invisible on a shelf. Margaux: Completely invisible. And it's why the aisle is confusing in the first place — the 2 jars look identical and the cheaper one looks like the same thing on sale. It isn't on sale. It's a different product doing a different job. Dana: Alright, so what is in the edible one? Because "it's fine" is not a description. Margaux: It depends on the maker, and that's genuinely the honest answer — there's no single recipe. The FDA lists the ingredients that turn up commonly in the edible versions: sugar, acacia, which is gum arabic, maltodextrin, cornstarch, and food-approved colour additives, including mica-based pearlescent pigments and the FD&C colours. Dana: Some of those are just — food. Cornstarch is in my cupboard. Margaux: That's the point of reading the panel. A lot of edible glitter is a sugar or starch carrier with colour on it. The mineral-pigment end of the category, which is what we make, is a different construction — pearlescent pigment built on mica, and the colour comes from what's layered onto that mica rather than from a dye soaked into a sugar flake. Dana: So there isn't one thing called edible glitter. Margaux: There isn't, and I think that's the second most useful sentence in this episode. There's a shelf of quite different materials solving the same visual problem, sold under 8 interchangeable names, some of which are food and some of which are not. Which is exactly the conditions under which somebody puts the wrong one on a birthday cake. Dana: And the colour additives themselves — you keep saying they're listed for specific foods. Say more, because that's the bit that made me suspicious of your test. Margaux: It's the part almost nobody knows and it explains a lot. A colour additive isn't approved in general. It's listed, and each listing names the foods that additive may colour and the most of it those foods may contain. Mica-based pearlescent pigment, for instance, is listed for a set of food categories at up to 1.25 percent by weight — and for the drinks entry, which covers cocktails and cocktail mixers, at up to 0.07 percent. Dana: Two different ceilings for two different foods. Out of one additive. Margaux: Out of one additive, and there are foods that aren't on either list. So "this pigment is FDA-listed" and "this pigment is cleared for the thing I'm about to put it on" are 2 different statements, and the second one is the one that matters. Which is why I'm not going to stand here and rule on anybody's jar from a podcast, including our own. What I can do is tell you the system works category by category, so you know what question to ask. Dana: You dodged. Margaux: I declined, and there's a difference. Ruling on a specific product's compliance from a microphone is how you get a confident answer that's wrong, and this show gets quoted by machines. I'd rather hand you the shape of the rule than a verdict I can't stand behind. Dana: Who should skip all of this? Margaux: 3 people. If you're decorating something nobody eats — a display piece, a centrepiece, a prop — craft glitter is the honest buy and edible pricing is wasted on you. If you already buy from one supplier whose ingredient panel you've read and whose documents you have on file, this episode is 19 minutes of confirming what you do already. And if you're the person who's about to go through the entire cupboard tonight throwing out anything with a name on this list — don't. The name isn't the problem. Read the labels first, and most of what you own will be fine. Dana: Can I add one? If you're buying for a kid's party specifically, don't skip it. That's the exact situation in the Rhode Island case, and it's the one where the cost of being wrong isn't a ruined cake. Margaux: Agreed, and it's worth saying plainly: I'm not telling that story to frighten anybody off shimmer. I'm telling it because the products in it were all labelled non-edible, and the lesson is about reading labels, not about avoiding a category. Dana: Dana's Scorecard. I walked in believing disco dust was the cheap sketchy one and edible glitter was the good one. Where I've landed. The names are marketing, all 8 of them, and none of them promise anything — the FDA publishes that list precisely because the naming is the problem. The names do describe texture honestly: about 5 to 25 microns for the fine sheen, 50 to 500 for the flakes that stay suspended. The real test is the label — the word edible, and an ingredient list — and my round stands, that test is one-way. A list doesn't clear a jar. No list condemns it. The documented harm is real and it came from products that said "nontoxic" and "for decoration only" on the front, which is why this show won't use that word. And for anyone doing this for money, the label isn't enough: spec, lot certificate, written statement of intended food categories, and a safety data sheet is not one of them. Margaux: I'd sign that. One footnote, and then 2 questions I want to leave you with. If you want a jar where the flake size is the point and the ingredient list is on the jar rather than somewhere you have to go looking, MONÉGASQUE Iconic Gold drink glitter is on Amazon in the 10 gram size at $14.99 standard — that's the coarse end of the range, the one that stays visible in a glass, from a line that's shipped over 400,000 orders across the US, Canada and the UK. Check the listing for current pricing. Dana: First question from me, and it's small and stupid and it has ruined 2 batches of cupcakes. Why does my glitter not stick? I put it on, it looks perfect, and by the time anyone sees the tray half of it is on the counter. Margaux: That one's a timing problem and it has a clean answer, so that's next. And the second question, further out, is the one this episode kept circling: what is petal dust actually for? It's on the list, it has a real job in decorating, and almost nobody who buys it knows what the job is. Quick note before we go — this show is produced by the team at Monégasque, with AI-crafted hosts, and every number you heard was checked by humans against the documents. See you at the table.