Mocktails, foot sprays and powders: Magnesium is having a moment
INFLUENCERS RECOMMEND MINERAL TO HELP YOU SLEEP, FOCUS, RELAX. IT LIKELY DOES MORE THAN YOU THINK BUT LESS THAN YOU HOPE.
OVER DINNER IN HOLLYWOOD, a friend confides that she’s spritzing it on the soles of her feet at night and getting “the best sleep of my life.” At Erewhon in Silver Lake, a noticeably focused and relaxed employee tells me she stirs it into tea for focus and relaxation. In my TikTok feed, a woman tries to end her threeday battle with constipation by chugging it straight from the bottle. (Disclaimer: Don’t.) Her giddy victory speech, full of graphic details that absolutely cannot be repeated here, has 27.8 million views and counting. All three of these people name the same ingredient as the key to their sweet relief — not some newly patented molecule or ancient herbal extract but one of the most common elements on earth: magnesium. After decades of middleof-the-alphabet anonymity on vitamin store shelves, the humble metal suddenly is taking a star turn in the wellness community, popping up in thousands of posts and even inspiring its own viral recipe, the Sleepy Girl Mocktail. (Tart cherry juice and magnesium powder, with an optional ring light.) Since the online debut of that elixir on TikTok last year, Google searches for “magnesium sleep” have more than doubled, while combined mentions on several other platforms — YouTube, X, Reddit, and Tumblr — have jumped 87%, according to the social media analytics company Sprout Social.
Magnesium’s online success also has been spurred in part by a Cambrian explosion of products and formulations, each adapted for a different niche in the wellness ecosystem. At Alo Yoga in the Grove, you can pick up Magnesium Reset Spray for misting over tense muscles. (“It’s our most popular wellness product,” an employee there told me.) At Malibu Vitamin Barn, you can grab packs of “Lypo-Spheric” magnesium gel, perfect for squeezing into your morning latte. Erewhon sells more than 30 forms of magnesium, each claiming a different benefit: magnesium carbonate for healthy sleep, magnesium bisglycinate for stress relief, ozonated magnesium oxides for better digestion, magnesium L-Threonate for cognitive support — the list goes on. A mere $250 will get you a massage supercharged with “heat activated” magnesium oil at the Conrad Hotel downtown.
Financially speaking, the wellness industry has finally succeeded where centuries of alchemists failed: turning magnesium into gold. Total sales of the supplement in its myriad forms are projected to top $1.5 billion in 2024, according to the Nutrition Business Journal, and there are no signs of slowing down.
“In the last year, we’ve brought in a lot of new magnesium products, and it keeps gaining traction,” said Maren Giuliano, VP of health and wellness at Erewhon, where sales of the supplement are up by more than 50% over last year. “It’s definitely hot right now.”
In the wellness world, this isn’t even magnesium’s first moment in the sun. (Actually, all magnesium started out inside a sun, or rather, inside decaying supernovas where helium and carbon nuclei were fused by unimaginably powerful forces to form new atoms, some of which have had the honor of ending up in Goop’s magnesium-rich Detoxifying Superpowder.)
The first recorded magnesium craze started in 1618, when a farmer in the English town of Epsom noticed that his cows wouldn’t drink from a bitter pool of water. Perhaps seeking some 17th-century form of clout, he decided to drink it himself. He quickly noticed the laxative effect for which Epsom salts would become world-famous, drawing hordes of stopped-up tourists to the town for decades to come.
Over the years, the supplement has been ascribed many medical powers, some more credible than others. In 1934, the New York Times announced a breakthrough discovery by a Johns Hopkins professor who found that “magnesium tends to sweeten the human disposition and that ‘grouchiness’ may be caused in part by the absence of this mineral salt in the system.”
In our current magnesium moment, the supplement is being marketed as a miracle cure for just about everything from muscle cramps to insomnia. The promise that magnesium can soothe, ground and calm us — like a gravity blanket for the mind — is especially alluring in anxious times when prices are surging, wars fill the news and the embers of the pandemic are still smoldering.
As a result, healthcare professionals are fielding a steady stream of questions from patients who are curious about what magnesium can do for them. The answer, according to experts interviewed for this article, could be summed up as: more than you might think, but less than you might hope.
So, what is it good for? Biologically, your body can’t run without magne