Verdant Alchemy began with a bath — although not in the way you might expect.
In my late twenties, when I was working in advertising and burning the candle at both ends, baths became my way of switching off after long days. At the time, I didn't think of it as a ritual. It was just something that helped me feel a bit more like myself again when everything else felt quite overwhelming.
Around that same time, I started working more closely in a wellness setting alongside my chiropractor brother. Many of the people we saw were dealing with stress-related tension, fatigue, back pain, headaches — the kinds of things that come from trying to keep up with modern life. Magnesium was often recommended as part of their care, and that's when I became more curious about mineral bathing.
I began adding magnesium-rich salts to my own baths to support recovery — particularly while managing long-standing back pain related to scoliosis — and slowly it became something I came to rely on. I didn't realise it at the time, but this was really where Verdant Alchemy began.
What started as a personal ritual eventually grew into a collection of restorative bathing and aromatherapy blends that have been stocked by premium retail partners such as Selfridges, Liberty London, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, and more recently introduced in Japan through partners including The Conran Shop and Tomorrowland.
Last year, I quietly decided to reformulate our award-winning bath salts, switching from traditional Epsom salts to magnesium chloride flakes. The original formula had received industry recognition, but magnesium flakes offered a higher elemental magnesium content — and I wanted to create the most effective bathing experience possible for our customers.
For a long time, that was the whole story: I loved a bath, I loved minerals, and I built a business around both.
Then a few years ago, that understanding changed. Following a long fertility journey, including a miscarriage and multiple rounds of IVF, rest stopped being about recovery from work and became about recovery from life. The rituals that once helped me unwind after long days took on a different meaning — helping me process grief, navigate uncertainty, and find moments of calm in a season that felt anything but.
That's when scent started to matter to me in a completely different way, especially during the long hours spent in hospital waiting rooms, where a bath wasn't an option but a few drops of oil on my wrist was. I realised scent wasn't just the finishing touch on a mineral soak — it was doing its own work, on its own timeline, in a way that had nothing to do with water or magnesium at all.
That's what Verdant Alchemy is built on now: magnesium and minerals recover the body, but scent recovers the nervous system, and you don't need a bathtub for that to happen. It's why the oils and roll-ons exist alongside the soaks — built to go with you into the parts of the day a bath can't reach.
If a proper soak is what tonight calls for, start with the mineral bath salts. If you need something that works from your desk, your car, or a waiting room, that's what the roll-ons are for.
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