A short history of confetti, from sugared almonds to pixels

It began as a sweet

The English word confetti comes from the Latin confectum by way of the Italian confetto, meaning a small sweet. Italian confetti are almonds with a hard sugar coating, the thing English speakers call Jordan almonds or dragées. Wikipedia records the tradition of handing them out in small tulle bags at life events, white for weddings, blue or pink for baptisms depending on the baby, and red for graduations.

That leaves Italians needing a different word for the paper kind. They use coriandoli, which comes from coriander. The sweets thrown at Carnival in the 1700s were sugar-coated seeds, and coriander was the common seed in the Milan area, so the name of the herb stuck to the paper that replaced it.

Carnival battles in Milan

Throwing things at parades is well documented in Milan from the 14th century. Nobles threw candies and flowers. Ladies threw eggshells filled with perfumed essences. The lower classes answered with rotten eggs, and fights between rival districts became common enough that in 1597 the city governor, Juan Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, banned egg-throwing and the spraying of liquids in the street.

The custom faded for about a century and came back in the 1700s as thrown sweets, mostly sugared seeds. When those became expensive, poorer Milanese switched to small chalk balls called benis de gess. An 1808 edict allowed only chalk, but the battles grew large enough to be dangerous and chalk was banned too, at which point people threw balls of mud. Italy Segreta's history of confetti tells the same sequence.

1875, paper disks from a silkworm farm

The paper confetti we know is usually credited to Enrico Mangili, a Milanese businessman working in silk and fabric printing. Italy Magazine gives the standard version. In 1875 Mangili began selling paper confetti for use in the parade for the Carnevale di Milano. The paper came from an industrial byproduct. Silkworm breeders used sheets punched with holes as bedding in their cages, and the small punched-out disks were waste until Mangili collected and sold them.

The dates deserve a note of caution. Italy Segreta credits a second inventor, Ettore Fenderl, a 14-year-old who in 1876 cut coloured paper into triangles and threw them during a celebration, and says there is ongoing debate about who did what first. Scientific American reported paper confetti at the Paris New Year's Eve celebrations of 1885. Wikipedia's current Confetti article carries the Milan Carnival history in detail but does not name Mangili or Fenderl, so the 1875 and 1876 dates rest on the Italian sources above rather than on Wikipedia.

Weddings, rice, and petals

Wedding confetti has a separate root. Long before paper, people threw grain at newlyweds. History Facts traces the practice to fertility symbolism, with wheat and barley treated as sacred symbols of abundance among the Celts and Mesopotamians, grain offerings to Ceres at Roman weddings, and the Hindu custom of Akshata, in which rice dyed with turmeric or vermilion is showered on the couple. Rice reached European weddings by the 19th century as it became affordable.

Wikipedia frames modern paper confetti as an adaptation of that older custom, moving from sweets and grains to paper through the centuries. In recent decades the trend has moved again, toward dried flower petals, birdseed, bubbles, and biodegradable paper, partly because venues ban plastic and foil. History Facts calls the rice-harms-birds story a myth, but the venue rules are real. If you want to make the eco-friendly kind yourself, the DIY confetti guide covers petals and leaves.

Ticker tape and the Canyon of Heroes

American confetti has its own origin story, and it was an accident. The first ticker-tape parade happened on October 28, 1886, during the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, when office workers in lower Manhattan spontaneously threw the paper tape from stock ticker machines out of their windows. The route down lower Broadway became known as the Canyon of Heroes, and more than 200 black granite strips in the sidewalk now record the people honoured there.

Ticker tape itself became obsolete in the 1960s when television and computers took over financial data. Modern parades use waste office paper and toilet paper run through ordinary shredders, plus confetti handed out by the city. Wikipedia's Confetti article makes the same point in one line. The simplest confetti is shredded paper.

Poppers and cannons

A party popper is a small handheld tube. Pulling the string sets off a tiny friction-actuated charge, less than 0.016 grams of material, or releases compressed air, and out come confetti or streamers with a bang. Confetti cannons scale the idea up. For small volumes, a plastic barrel is loaded and fired with compressed air or carbon dioxide. For stadiums, a venturi air mover driven by carbon dioxide throws far larger amounts over far greater distances. Wikipedia notes that confetti at trophy presentations became common in the early 21st century.

Most of what falls at those events is not paper. What shops call metallic confetti is actually metallized PVC, which is one reason venues have tightened their rules.

The digital era

The newest confetti weighs nothing. Apps fire it when you finish a lesson, complete a task, or pay for something, and the reasons that works are covered in why confetti feels so good. Most web confetti runs on a small open-source library called canvas-confetti, released under the ISC license and described by its author as performant confetti animation in the browser. Its defaults are 50 particles, a 90 degree launch angle, and a 45 degree spread, and every value can be changed.

Pop the Confetti uses that library with the dials turned up. Each press fires between 50 and 300 pieces at a random angle with a random spread, plays a pop you can mute, and that is the whole product. There are no accounts and no ads. It is the same impulse as the Milanese nobles throwing sweets, minus the sweets, the chalk, and the sweeping. If you would like to build one, the confetti button tutorial shows the exact settings.

A timeline

• 14th century. Milan nobles throw candies and flowers at parades.
• 1597. Milan bans egg-throwing and liquid-spraying at Carnival.
• 1700s. Sugared coriander seeds return as the thing to throw, giving Italian its word coriandoli.
• 1808. A Milan edict permits only chalk balls.
• 1875. Enrico Mangili sells punched paper disks from silkworm bedding as Carnival confetti.
• 1876. Ettore Fenderl, aged 14, throws hand-cut paper triangles, by the Italy Segreta account.
• 1885. Scientific American reports paper confetti at New Year's Eve in Paris.
• 1886. The first ticker-tape parade, at the Statue of Liberty dedication in New York.
• 1960s. Ticker tape goes obsolete and parades switch to shredded paper.
• Early 21st century. Confetti cannons become standard at trophy presentations.
• 2020s. Confetti in apps, checkouts, and a free button on a web page.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it called confetti? The word is the plural of the Italian confetto, a sugared almond or small sweet, because sweets were what people originally threw at Carnival. Italians call paper confetti coriandoli, after the coriander seeds inside those sweets.

Who invented paper confetti? The usual credit goes to Enrico Mangili of Milan in 1875, who sold punched paper disks left over from silkworm bedding. Some Italian sources also credit Ettore Fenderl in 1876, and the sources say the question is still debated.

Why do we throw confetti at weddings? It descends from throwing grain at newlyweds as a symbol of fertility and plenty, a custom found in Roman, Celtic, and Hindu traditions. Paper, and now petals, replaced the grain.

Is digital confetti really confetti? It is the same gesture with none of the cleanup. A click on the confetti button fires up to 300 pieces drawn on a canvas, which is closer to a party popper than to a sugared almond, but the joy is the same.