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Lipstick on the collar, a stray earring tucked into seat cushions: women have long relied on makeup and fashion to catch cheaters. Now, there’s a new method for singles who want to ensure a date doesn’t have a secret spouse at home – provided they aren’t afraid of microplastics.
In a TikTok posted this month with more than 2m likes, the fitness influencer Dalia Grande spritzed glitter all over her body while getting ready for a first date: “bc I’m at the age where they could be married (Married men HATE glitter)”, she wrote in the caption.
The subtext, for anyone who has never talked to a shiny mermaid at a Halloween party and gone home to discover that they, too, are now somehow covered in sparkles: cosmetic glitter transfers easily, leaving a trail of evidence from one woman to the next.
Or, as one commenter put it: “Married men don’t want to come home to their wives with fun glitter on them.”
Liz Olivier, a makeup artist based in New York, called this theory “the strip club test”, referring to a trope in which a wife learns her husband has come home from a lap dance due to his unusually sparkly skin.
“Glitter is a makeup artist’s nightmare,” Olivier said. “If it explodes in your kit, it gets everywhere and ruins everything. If you’ve ever been to Burning Man or a music festival, you know it’s not coming off for days. So yes, glitter could be a way to catch someone cheating, or to mark your territory.”
For the Cosmopolitan beauty editor, Beth Gillette, using glitter to snare a philanderer seems like a ploy straight out of Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell’s 2020 revenge fantasy, in which a woman played by Carey Mulligan uses her femininity to bait and con abusive men.
“I feel like trapping people through makeup is totally something that character would do in the film,” Gillette said. “Or, this puts me in the headspace of Taylor Swift’s New Year’s Day: ‘There’s glitter on the floor after the party …’ We all know it’s impossible to remove.”
It may not be entirely advisable to douse one’s body in glitter, which is a microplastic. A spate of recent research indicates microplastics can negatively affect human health and the environment. In 2023, the EU, always ahead of its US counterparts when it comes to nixing toxic substances, has even banned cosmetic glitter. (Brands have until 2035 to fully remove it from makeup.)
Still, over the years TikTokers have found various ways to nail, or punish, two-timers with it.
One user suggested pouring some loose glitter on the passenger side vanity mirror of a partner’s car, with the idea that it would make a mess should another woman open it to check her hair or makeup. (Fair warning, from one commenter: “Jokes on me, I would forget I did this and glitter myself.”)
Or, as an alternative to classic payback such as keying a wayward lover’s car, consider a less illegal (but still devastating) TikTok-approved approach: glitter bombing his home.
Though the glitter experiment is mostly a cutesy trend, it’s also a larger indictment of dating in 2025. After all, the fact that it might be necessary for single women to weed out married men using sneaky glimmer makeup means the bar is very low to begin with.
“Dating fatigue in the post-pandemic world is so real,” Gillette said. “Everyone is so frustrated with the lack of options on apps, and when you do potentially match with someone, they all seem so unserious. By the time you actually do go on a date with someone, you’re low-key exhausted and kind of over it. I, too, would do anything to make my dates seem a bit more exciting.”
One last word of advice to anyone considering this trick: too much glitter makes your life a mess, too. (Just ask any parent who’s not cheating on their spouse – sometimes their kids like to craft!) As Gillette put it: “I can just picture coming home from a bad date and being so annoyed with myself now that I have to get in the shower and scrub all this body glitter off.”
