Is plastic really cheaper than good old fashion sugar? I think it is more plastics have a ohhhhhh fancy "specially formulated" marketing appeal to them. They put them in clear bottles to show them off, hey look MICROBEADS! Example: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3SVQtbwrvVY/Tk2uks5kLHI/AAAAAAAAGM... See, look? BURSTING BEADS® It's even a registered trademark. They can't say with sugar® or ground walnut® (which is what St. Ives's apricot scrub uses). Doesn't sound high tech enough.

Yes, sugar is hellishly expensive (in comparison). Why do you think cheap food stuffs use HFCS and similar sweetners instead of "good old fashion sugar"? Plastic is cheaper than a lot of other "traditional" or "natural" materials, it's why its often used in e.g. packaging that used to be paper/card.

You can put a trademark on anything you want, it's not a patent on the substance. Evian is trademark on water, for example.

Sugar is artificially expensive. It's the government's fault, via tariffs and production caps.

It's time to make the sugar barons eat dirt (but free of tiny plastic beads — that would be cruel and unusual).

Indeed, and Oil is artificially cheap (other subsidies aside, production, consumption and disposal of plastics usually don't include the pricing of externalities). Nevertheless, that is how it's priced, and that is why it's not used by these companies by choice.

HFCS is largely used because of the corn lobby. The market price of sugar is 17 cents per pound. The price of one of these facial products ranges from $10 to $50, and they're typically about 8 oz, so about 5 cents if it were 50% sugar. Cost is not a significant factor. The total manufacturing cost of the beads including the equipment, testing, and branding probably makes them equivalent to sugar, or perhaps more expensive.

Most plastics are ridiculously cheap to manufacture. On the scale that the manufacturers mentioned operate, the costs of equipment etc. are quite small in comparison. And don't forget, with the sugar you still have the equipment costs etc. for refining it (granulated sugar doesn't grow on trees!). And branding it as "NaturalSucroseSuperBeads TM" still costs the same.

> Cost is not a significant factor.

Yes, for multi-nationals, it is. Increase that 5c for plastic to 6c for sugar, and that’s potentially a million or two off the bottom line for the company. That's how large companies work.

Also, if it's more expensive to use plastics for these products, why do you suppose they didn't use "NaturalSucroseSuperBeads TM" from the start? Perhaps they didn't think of it? Unlikely. If it really wasn't for cost reasons, then its likely for ease of production, product stability, or other such reasons.

I searched briefly and found a response from The Body Shop:

> This is a wider beauty industry issue and we, like many other global beauty brands, have been forced to use synthetic scrub particles for face products in the last few years as safety restrictions in some markets around the world have become more stringent. These safety restrictions require us to ensure that all scrub particles used on the face are consistently rounded in shape, which is difficult to achieve with natural particles. In order to provide a global product formulation that is stable and safe for use we have, unfortunately, had to resort to synthetic materials such as polyethylene.

http://5gyres.org/posts/2013/04/26/get_plastic_off_my_face_a...

I agree that there may be other reasons to choose plastic over sugar - companies don't generally do things that are bad for them - I was only disputing the disparity in the raw cost of the ingredients. Personally I've noticed that sugar based scrubs don't hold up as well, they tend to either dry out in the jar or get too wet. Fussy consumers who want life to look like a TV commercial are part of the problem here.

Sugar (or salt as was also proposed on this thread) are quite self evidently not a solution to be used in these products which contain water.

No, salt does work as a facial scrub. It does not dissolve because it is in a saturated solution (lots of NaCl, very little H2O). It's kind of fun to use because it scrubs for a while and then just disappears when you rinse with water.

Here's an example product:

http://www.origins.com/product/3829/10219/Bath-Body/Star-Col...

Working on boats and cars with my dad, we always cleaned up using sugar and dish soap. Never salt! Because it'd make those scraped knuckles sting! :)

Just get the marketing guys to make up something about the stinging letting you know that it's working. ;)

You need to cruise through the skin care center of your local cosmetics/beauty/whatever store. If you put in only enough water to keep things moving, rather than creating an unsaturated solution, sugar and salt work very nicely.

Couple that with the added benefit of being water soluble, cleanup after using the product is especially easy. Scrub and rinse (and gently scrub) until you can't feel the product. It's self-documenting. :-)

Really? Sugar scrubs are so soso very old. They predate the costemtics industry.

http://www.treehugger.com/organic-beauty/8-homemade-salt-and...

uh, of course they can, "ALL NATURAL CANE FLOWER CRYSTALS"