How often does the average person think about marine wildlife in their day-to-day activities? I'd venture to say it is quite rare, but why is this so? We, as the most intelligent species, have an enormous impact on everything we touch, which opens the question of what we are blind to in this constant exchange. Our desire for a little shimmer and sparkle may seem innocent enough, but when that touch of shine comes in the form of glitter, a household microplastic, it may be damaging our ecosystems. According to a research paper published by Xiang et al. (2022), the circulation of microplastics in the ecosystem and its interaction with other pollutants in the environment has negative impacts on organisms and environmental health. This paper reviewed the recent progress in identifying the trophic transfer of microplastics, by which they can potentially become part of the human food chain. In addition, I came across an app developed by the Plastic Soap Foundation that allows users to scan the ingredient label of an item to check if it has plastic ingredients. This was crucial to my understanding of the severity of the issue, as I was able to see the large amount of products around our homes that contain microplastics such as makeup and aluminum foil. Taking inspiration from this research, and working with my AP Biology teacher, I found one relation to be in my own makeup products (literally hiding beneath my nose). The detrimental effects that microplastics, such as glitter, can have on marine life became a research topic for a year-long Science Fair project that my partner and I developed. With business, psychology, and hard science being involved, this topic reeled in my interest almost immediately. My purpose was to test the effects of microplastics on the growth of unicellular Algae, as well as on the flow of energy and cycling of matter in our biological food chain. In the experiment, microplastics were modeled by glitter to determine if their presence hinders the production and release of oxygen by diatoms, commonly known as unicellular algae. Two experimental groups, each containing either conventional or cellulose-based biodegradable glitter, were set up with a diatom solution. This was done to assess whether the composition of the glitter had a significant effect on the survival of diatoms. A colorimeter was used to calculate the turbidity, and an ANOVA T-test was utilized to differentiate correlation from causation and determine whether the gathered data set was statistically significant. The p-value was less than the alpha of 5%, and thereby the data set was deemed to be inconsistent with the null hypothesis. This indicated that biodegradable glitter groups had a cloudier solution compared to conventional glitter groups, indicating that more algae were present in the samples. This experiment contributes to current scientific research to inform scientists about the crucial role microplastics play in the health of aquatic systems, as diatoms produce a substantial amount of Earth’s oxygen and regulate carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.