How to Make Your Own Magnesium Oil
It won’t surprise anyone to hear that we don’t advocate for using our Ancient Minerals Bath Flakes to create a homemade magnesium oil. Why? Our commitment to purity and quality standards.
Ancient Minerals Magnesium Baths vs. Ancient Minerals Magnesium Oil
In short, our magnesium bath flakes are not going to be of the same purity or composition as the original magnesium oil, even though they are created using the same magnesium oil base.
Why is this?
Magnesium chloride (MgCl2) is hygroscopic, which means it readily retains and attracts moisture. You may have noticed this if you’ve used our bath flakes – if you leave them exposed to the air they will actually begin to melt as they draw molecules of water to them. Because of this characteristic, the production of the flakes requires an evaporating process using high heat.
To produce our bath flakes, magnesium oil is heated up to roughly around 320 Degrees Fahrenheit (160 Celcius) and the water is evaporated until a concentration of 47% of magnesium chloride is reached. Due to the heating process needed for this amount of evaporation to occur, a small amount of MgCl2 will decompose to MgOHCl (magnesium hydroxide chloride), MgCO3 (magnesium carbonate) and HCl (hydrochloric acid). These resulting compounds are responsible for the cloudiness and tint that can be seen after dissolving the flakes. They are not hazardous, but are by-products of the necessary steps to get the magnesium chloride crystals. If you’ve attempted magnesium oil from our flakes, this is why it appeared cloudy.
Conversely, our magnesium oil spray goes through an additional filtration process which removes superfluous elements such as iron (which causes an orange tinge) so that the finished product is of the highest purity possible with unmatched clarity. Homemade magnesium oil can appear slightly orange, brown, or yellow.
For uses requiring lower concentrations of magnesium with large amounts of water, such as body baths, foot baths or flotation tanks, the flakes are perfectly suitable. The higher dilution in these applications also means that those by-products are diluted as well, making their presence inconsequential.
Using Ancient Minerals Bath Flakes to create magnesium oil would significantly increase the concentration of those by-products, and therefore increase your direct exposure to them.
For those who wish to apply magnesium at its highest topical concentration, we recommend the undiluted purity that can only be achieved by applying the Ancient Minerals Magnesium Oil .