I close my eyes and instead of falling asleep I see this: “Talc, Mica, Magnesium Stearate, Polyethylene…” – one of the thousands of product ingredient lists I had meticulously combed through. This particular one came from a make-up product and stood out to me because it raised so many excellent questions about the scale of the microbead pollution problem (or microplastic ingredients as I prefer to call them after spending years on developing robust definitions).