Even fewer are those who know that a quarter of the world production of mica comes from India, the states of Jharkhand and Bihar, from 90% illegal mines that employ a large amount of child labor. A report just published by the Dutch institute Somo, Global Mining and the Impact on Children Rights, informs us that in India the minors employed in the mica extraction are around 22,000, many of them under twelve. Instead of going to school, they spend their days chopping mica chips, when they do not go down into the underground tunnels to detach the slabs and bring them to the surface. These children earn slave wages, as well as those of their fathers, who because of their miserable wages are forced to bring their children with them to work. Here, therefore, they are they among the stones, dusty, shabby and stunted small producers of mica that allow us to develop brilliant tricks.

Already in 2016, the Reuters Foundation had published a report revealing their sad condition;  this report pointed out that working children do not have to deal only with fatigue, but also with the dust that compromises their lungs and accidents sometimes so serious to cause injuries and mutilating fractures if not death (Watch the video The Ugly Face of Beauty: Is Child Labour the Foundation for your Makeup?). The Indian organization Bachpan Bachao Andolan, active against child labor, believes that in the mica mines a dozen people die every month, many of them minors.

The service by the Reuters Foundation induced various companies using mica - including l'Oréal, Chanel, H & M, to run for cover by forming a coordination called RMI (Responsible Mica Initiative) with the aim of identifying and pursuing common strategies to combat child labor. However, a year later the Reuters Foundation returned to the mining areas and found that little or nothing had changed. In a new document published in December 2017, we read that children continue to die in these ghost mines. Ironically, just May 1 in Girihit, Jharkhand state, four people died, including two teenagers. The mother of one of them says: "When we learned that the mine had collapsed we came running and we dug with our bare hands to find Laxmi. Despite a broken leg, the girl had made her way to the exit, but we arrived too late: we found her dead. She was twelve years old".

Representatives of Indian non-governmental organizations are urging: "RMI has made many promises, but all failed". The companies themselves admit: "The initiatives taken so far have only marginally contributed to combating child labor because the collective effort called for by the alliance has failed".

At the most, philanthropic initiatives were taken, more useful for social washing than for human elevation. The challenge is the dignity of work, because child labor disappears on its own if families are freed from need. A goal that requires much more than simple control actions. As a first step, the gendarmerie is very good because it can exclude the presence of illegal suppliers in its production chains. Then proactive policies are needed to guarantee the safety of workplaces, trade union freedoms and the payment of livable wages. Companies, however, are unlikely to start spontaneously on a path that is not compatible with the logic of profit. They will do it only if pushed by consumers who already had an important result in the cosmetics sector. In 2009, a European regulation was adopted that prohibits the testing of cosmetics on animals and the sale of cosmetics containing ingredients tested on animals. The provision was the result of a long battle of civil society, demonstrating that wanting is power. Today we must use the same determination to free beauty from another form of cruelty that is even more odious. We must ask institutions and companies to take all the measures they need to ensure the dignity of work and free humanity from the shame of child labor. Not doing it would be like saying that we have less respect for the life of a child than that of a rat.