Last winter I spent two weeks rebuilding a sticker library for a spring launch that never should have looked quiet in the first place. The clean version was polite and forgettable; the version people kept saving had foil borders, mint tabs, and a dolphin on every section break. That was the day I stopped treating decoration as extra and started treating it as a decision.
Glitter is a navigation system
In a saturated interface, every color has a job. Pink pulls the eye, mint marks a safe path, purple carries the side quest, and yellow says the thing is ready now. When I watched a designer in Brooklyn scan three mockups at 10:40 p.m., she did not ask for less energy; she asked for clearer signals.
The old warning was that ornament slows the page. In practice, it only slows confusion. If the system is bright enough to be read at a glance, the glitter behaves like structure, not noise.