The increasing number of injectable cosmetic treatments and fillers carried out around the world is driven by a seemingly universal need to look younger than we are. Most are administered to women, but a growing number of men are having them too.
This beauty-is-youth belief has a geological cost. Over 14 million stainless steel hypodermic needles are used and discarded annually for cosmetic treatments around the world. The metals used to create them are considered critical.
Stainless stee…
The increasing number of injectable cosmetic treatments and fillers carried out around the world is driven by a seemingly universal need to look younger than we are. Most are administered to women, but a growing number of men are having them too.
This beauty-is-youth belief has a geological cost. Over 14 million stainless steel hypodermic needles are used and discarded annually for cosmetic treatments around the world. The metals used to create them are considered critical.
Stainless steel is an iron and chromium alloy with nickel added to most of it. The iron in a needle might have come from the Pilbara in Western Australia. It was born over a billion years ago when oxygen from the photosynthesis of early bacteria combined with iron in the ancient oceans and settled on the sea floor.
The chromium could have come from the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, an igneous intrusion created when magma found its way to the Earth’s crust through vertical cracks, then cooled, allowing the chromite to differentiate itself, crystallising in distinct layers.
- ** Read more: The importance of critical minerals should not condone their extraction at all costs ** *
And then there’s the nickel. Like chromite, it began its life in the upwelling and cooling of magma associated with the formation of the continents as we know them now, and through the weathering of igneous rocks. It’s likely to have come from Indonesia, where deposits of nickel are close to the surface and economical to extract.
A critical mineral is one that is considered essential for a state’s economy, national security and clean energy technologies, and has a supply chain vulnerable to disruption by war, tariffs and scarcity. Critical minerals cannot easily be replaced by something else.
The needles used to perform injectable cosmetic surgey are made using various critical minerals. fast-stock/Shutterstock
The critical list
What is on a particular country’s critical minerals list says something about the geopolitics of the places where commodities are mined, the characteristics of the commodity itself and the priorities of the country compiling the list.
Chromium is considered critical by the US, Canada and Australia because it is essential for stainless steel production and other high-performance alloys. Demand for chromium is expected to grow by 75 times between 2020 and 2040 due, in part, to the clean energy transition. Reserves are concentrated, with South Africa producing over 40% of supply in 2023, followed by Kazakhstan, Turkey, India and Finland.
Nickel was added to the UK’s critical mineral list in 2024. Described as the “Swiss army knife” of energy transition minerals, it is used to increase energy density in lithium batteries, allowing for their miniaturisation and increasing the range in electric cars. Indonesia holds 42% of the world’s reserves.
Even iron ore is on the list. High-quality iron ore was put on Canada’s critical minerals list in 2024 because of its importance for “green steel” production and decarbonisation goals.
The rapidly increasing demand for stainless steel for cosmetic purposes is tangled up with urgent demands from other sectors. It is essential for construction, transportation, food production and storage, medicine and the manufacture of consumer goods.
It is vital for defence. Stainless steel is used in aircraft and vehicle components, naval vessels, missile parts and ballistics.
Needles used in cosmetic procedures are also entangled with other resource-related issues that have no easy answer: mining-related conflict, concerns about the environmental and social impact of mining and controversy over new mining frontiers, like the deep seabed and the Moon.
Then there is the carbon footprint of the multiple processes required to turn rocks into needles and disposing of them safely. Each one has to be mined, shipped, smelted, manufactured, trucked, used, put in a sharps bin and then incinerated.
Do we have to choose between cosmetic procedures or the green transition? Cosmetic procedures or defence? No. Our increasing demand for injectable cosmetic procedures isn’t responsible for making chromium, nickel and iron ore critical. But it’s part of that story and it comes with a cost.
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