Nah corporations really don't give a shit at all, like all chewing gum is literally just plastic too and sheds tons of microplastics into your mouth as you chew it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/rethink-chewing-gum-habit-essentially-plastic/

Plastic is an organic material though, so your assumption was correct.

It is. Along with PFAS.

bordering on insanity

It's that bullshit when they take a vertically oriented picture/video, stretch it and blur it to a 4:3 ratio, and center the content over it.

Imo a waste of bandwidth and computer power for people who can't cope with the idea of vertical content on a horizontal screen, on a platform primarily accessed by phones anyway.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1

This study released last year based on samples from cadavers suggests there’s enough in your brain to make a plastic spoon

Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.[1] They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.[2]

-Wikipedia

If these aren't microplastics, what are?

"Micro" just means "small" in this case and doesn't mean "microscopic" or have anything to do with "micrometer".

The definition of "microplastic" according to NOAA: "Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long".

Map of countries where they're banned

They probably had some extra plastic to offload lol.

I feel like it's just capitalism doing a capitalism. People are self-conscious about their skin, so you can sell them all kinds of crap.
Even a basic washcloth does a decent job with exfoliating, if you use it regularly. Rub your face dry with a scruffy towel, if you need more than that.

But of course, there's hardly any money to be made with reasonably priced products, so you won't see TV ads for them.

No, but these beads pretty much go straight into the local waterways where they can very quickly break down into micro plastics. All so a human didn't have to use a tool like a brush or a loofa to scrub themselves. Convenience at any cost.