Microplastics in Makeup: We Audited 81 Formulas from Fenty, Huda Beauty, rhode and Kylie Cosmetics

Last updated: July 31, 2026

Why we did this the boring way

There is a lot of content claiming that famous beauty brands are “full of microplastics.” Almost none of it names a product, quotes an ingredient list, or defines the word. The usual move is to flag dimethicone, call it “liquid plastic,” and stop there.

That is not what a microplastic is. Under Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2055, the law that actually restricts these ingredients, a synthetic polymer microparticle has to be solid, has to be under 5 mm, and has to be poorly water-soluble (under 2 g/L). Dimethicone is a liquid silicone fluid. It fails the first test. PEG compounds dissolve in water. They fail the third.

Both are legitimate things to have opinions about. Neither is a microplastic, and lumping them in makes the real finding disappear into the noise. So we went and counted the real thing.

Method, and its limits

On 30 July 2026 we walked each brand's own product sitemap, fetched every product page, and extracted the ingredient list as the brand publishes it. No third-party ingredient databases, several of the popular ones are user-uploaded and years stale.

We collapsed shade variants into single formulas, a fourteen-shade brow pencil is one formula, not fourteen findings, and then counted formulas containing at least one solid synthetic polymer particle.

We deliberately did not count:

• Dimethicone, cyclopentasiloxane, phenyl trimethicone — liquid silicone fluids, not solid particles.
• PEG- and PPG- compounds — water-soluble, explicitly outside the definition.
• Polyquaternium compounds — water-soluble.
• Silica dimethyl silylate — silica is a mineral, the silicone is a surface treatment.
• Hydrogenated polyisobutene, polybutene — liquid synthetic hydrocarbon polymers. Real petrochemicals, not particles.

The honest limits. We only captured formulas where the brand publishes a machine-readable ingredient list on its own site. That gave us 14 distinct Fenty formulas, 12 Huda, 20 Kylie and 35 rhode — a sample, not a census. Fenty in particular publishes far more products than it publishes parseable ingredient lists for. The per-brand percentages are therefore not directly comparable as a league table, and we would be misleading you if we presented them as one. What the numbers support is the pattern: which product categories carry solid polymers, and which specific named products do.

Ingredient lists change without notice and vary by market and shade. Everything below was true of the ingredient list published on the brand's own site on 30 July 2026. Check the item in your hand.

What we found

The named products, and what they list

The three products that surprised us

We expected the celebrity lip products to be the worst offenders. They were not.

rhode Peptide Lip Treatment, the single most photographed beauty product of the last three years, contains no solid synthetic polymer particles. Its published list runs Hydrogenated Polyisobutene, Diisostearyl Malate, shea butter, Polybutene, waxes. Those first and fourth ingredients are synthetic petroleum-derived polymers, and if your objection to plastic is “I don't want petrochemicals on my mouth,” that objection stands. But they are liquids. They are not microplastics, and we are not going to call them microplastics to win a headline.

Kylie Cosmetics Matte Liquid Lipstick likewise: isododecane, mica, dicalcium phosphate, octyldodecanol, hydrogenated styrene/isoprene copolymer. That copolymer is an elastomeric binder, not a particle. Clean on this specific test.

And the reverse surprise: rhode, the brand with the most minimalist “skin barrier” positioning of the four, put Acrylates Copolymer in a rinse-off cleanser — the exact product category the EU restricts first.

The pattern that actually matters

Sort the findings by product format instead of by brand and the noise resolves into something you can act on:

• Loose and pressed powders (setting, baking, blurring): the highest-risk category, and the one where the polymer is doing the headline job. Nylon-12 and PMMA are the blur.
• Pencils and sticks (brow, lip liner, cream blush): polyethylene is the default wax hardener. Very common, low concentration.
• Glitter and shimmer (lip toppers, shadows, highlighters): PET flakes. The most literal plastic in the category.
• Long-wear liquid foundations: silicone elastomer crosspolymers, the “soft-focus” texture.
• Liquid lipsticks, balms, oils, serums: usually clean on this test. Their polymers tend to be liquid.

If you only change one thing, change the powder. It is the product applied in the largest quantity, to the largest surface area, in the most inhalable form.

Does any of this actually harm you?

Here is where we say what we don't know, because that is the whole point of the site.

There is no published study showing that nylon-12 or PMMA in a cosmetic powder causes disease in humans. Not one. Intact skin is a genuinely good barrier, and particles in the 1–50 µm range that these powders use are far too large to cross it. Anyone telling you your setting powder is giving you microplastics in your bloodstream is inventing that.

The two arguments that survive scrutiny are narrower:

• Inhalation. Loose powder is aerosolised by design, and it is applied to the face, next to the airway. Particle inhalation is a far better-established route than dermal absorption. This is the exposure route worth caring about, and it is the one with the least cosmetic-specific research.
• Environmental release. This is why the EU acted, and the reasoning is explicit. Rinse-off products go down the drain. Leave-on products end up on towels and in the wash. ECHA's estimate for the whole restriction is roughly half a million tonnes of microplastic release prevented over 20 years.

So the fair verdict is: a real environmental problem, a plausible-but-unquantified inhalation question, and no demonstrated dermal health risk. If someone sells you certainty in either direction, they are selling something.

Why it is all still perfectly legal until 2035

Regulation (EU) 2023/2055 phases in by product type, and make-up got the longest runway of anything in the entire restriction:

Nothing in this article is a claim that any brand broke a rule. Every product named is legal to sell in the EU today and will be for another nine years. The gap between what is legal and what a shopper assumes is in a $40 powder is the entire story.

The brand-by-brand breakdowns

Each of these goes product by product with the full published ingredient lists:

• Does Fenty Beauty have microplastics? — the PET glitter and the PMMA blurring powder.
• Does Huda Beauty have microplastics? — Easy Bake and the nylon question.
• Does rhode have microplastics? — the Peptide Lip Treatment verdict, and where rhode actually slips.
• Does Kylie Cosmetics have microplastics? — ten purity badges, and the one that isn't there.
• Clean beauty's plastic loophole — why “Clean at Sephora” and a 1,600-ingredient ban list both let polymers straight through.