Inside the Glitter Lab

In a fascinating piece for Popular Mechanics, Jacqueline Detwiler-George discusses the surprising value of glitter as a crime forensics tool. These tiny, sparkly particles have long aided investigators and, as Detwiler-George reports, can be used to solve all sorts of crimes—including murders, abductions, and sexual assaults—that often involve girls and young women. She recounts one brutal crime in California’s Simi Valley, where traces of red, glossy, and hexagonal glitter helped a trace evidence expert identify a killer. (Subscription required to view the article.)

Before the Barroso case, Jones was never “the glitter guy,” he says. That would be Robert Blackledge, a forensic chemist for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS, for you primetime crime show aficionados) Regional Forensic Laboratory in San Diego. Blackledge, who died in 2024, knew everything there was to know about using glitter as trace evidence: how it worked better to pick it up with the sticky part of Post-it notes than with tape; how to measure its size based on its shape; and how rare it is for a single glitter product to contain multiple sizes and shapes. Blackledge wrote several papers and shepherded multiple graduate students through theses on the topic, and he kept a library of over 100 glitters. Years ago, he sent a subset of that collection to Jones in a box that was so shellacked with sparkle it took Jones two years to clean it all out of his microscope room. Jones—who has been collecting his own glitter since the ’80s—has been adding to it ever since, and the combined set is now one of the largest collections of glitter in the world, contained in a three-ring binder of slotted coin-collecting pages that Jones sets up behind him during Zoom calls.