I love spraying magnesium oil on my skin.
It’s one of the best ways to get more magnesium into my body because it completely bypasses the digestive route (which can be tricky) and instead is absorbed directly through my skin.
Other therapies that use the transdermal (through the skin) method of delivery include nicotine and hormone patches.
Why I spray magnesium oil on my body
I tell people that I do it for the health benefits from getting enough magnesium (I also ingest magnesium chloride tablets daily).
But the real reason is that magnesium always relaxes me, like nothing else can. It doesn’t matter how bad a day I had or how stressed out I am, spraying magnesium oil over my back, neck and shoulders always does the trick.
It’s actually a little freaky just how fast and effective it is. My tense, hard-as-rock muscles start loosening within 10-15 minutes of spraying magnesium oil over my skin.
I would describe the feeling as unadulterated relief and a pure, relaxed state.
Store-bought magnesium oil is usually expensive
You can buy ready-made magnesium oil in bottles, but they can be quite pricey. I actually started out by using store-bought magnesium oil.
It was awesome and I fell in love with it immediately. But since I plan to continue using magnesium oil until someone pries it out of my cold, dead hands, it didn’t make much financial sense to keep buying those pricey bottles (which are mostly water).
So I searched for an alternative and the Internet provided.
Ingredients used to make my own magnesium oil
There are only 2 ingredients needed to make my own DIY mag oil — magnesium chloride bath salts/crystals and water.
Instead of magnesium chloride bath salts/crystals, you can also use nigari (same thing) or magnesium chloride flakes. They’ll all work the same.
I use dechlorinated water instead of tapwater because I don’t want chlorine on my skin when I spray the magnesium oil and leave it to dry (it basically stays on my skin until my next shower). My dechlorinated water is just regular tap water that I’ve left out for 24 hours (the chlorine will evaporate in a day).
The tools I use to help me make the magnesium oil are pretty basic and inexpensive:
– clear bottles (these make it easier for me to see how much filtering the magnesium oil needs). I don’t buy them, instead I re-use my old apple cider vinegar bottles.
– a large funnel
– unbleached coffee filter paper
How I make my own DIY magnesium oil
I usually make 4 bottles at a time and store them in the fridge.
1) First thing I do is half-fill the bottles with dechlorinated tapwater. The reason I only fill them halfway is to leave room for the magnesium chloride crystals and the rest of the water (which will be hot to help dissolve the crystals better).
2) Then I place the funnel at the opening and add 9-10 rounded teaspoons of magnesium chloride crystals. I help move them along down the funnel with some hot water, which I’m able to do because the bottles are only half-full when I started.
By the way, I use 9-10 rounded teaspoons because that’s right for me. But you can find your own optimal amount to add by simple trial and error.
What I did to find mine was to count how many spoonfuls of the crystals I could add and dissolve with hot water until I saw that there were some at the bottom that would remain undissolved no matter how much I shook the bottle. This indicates a kind of “saturation point” for magnesium chloride for that amount of water.
3) I repeat this for all 4 bottles until they’re full. They’d be warm to the touch because I’ve used half hot water and half room temperature water.
At this point, I’d have 4 full bottles of “magnesium oil”, but the magnesium oil would also be a little grey and murky. See the left bottle in the photo below.
4) So I filter this “crude” magnesium oil using a funnel and filter paper. I effectively filter twice. I pour one bottle’s contents into a different container (1st filter). Then I pour it back into the now-empty bottle (2nd filter). The first filter takes longer because the debris clogs up the filter paper quite a bit, but the second filter gets done much faster since the mag oil would already be relatively pure.
I keep my bottles of DIY mag oil in the fridge and transfer a little to a small refillable plastic spray bottle that I keep on my desk to use whenever I need.
And that’s it! 🙂