Purchasing Powers

In a pink-lit room dubbed the Pleasure Paradigm, I stretched out atop an infrared heating pad filled with crushed-up amethyst while a young woman rolled a crystal sphere over my abdomen. Healing crystals have popped up everywhere in the last year, but until that moment, a crystal had never been so close to my vulva. The woman sitting beside me, her hip pressed lightly into mine, was Julia Schoen, co-owner of Glacce, purveyor of the “original crystal-elixir water bottle.” It was Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and the opening party of Glacce’s headquarters buzzed on the other side of the door. But the vibe in the Pleasure Paradigm was muffled, interior, like a therapist’s office, complete with suggestive tools like a hand-drawn Ouija board and a foraged branch serving as a white-noise machine. In this room, you—and the crystals—are meant to heal yourself.

“Crystals are mirrors,” Schoen said. “The basis of healing is learning to access the special intuition we all possess.”

Glacce hopes to expand on its primary product: an $80-and-up, cylindrical, glass water bottle with a crystal obelisk inside, sold by GOOP and Free People, and named a “2018 Status Symbol” by Vanity Fair. As part of the plan to transition the company into a holistic “luxury-spiritual lifestyle brand,” Schoen demonstrated the crystal massage Glacce offers in partnership with boutique-hotel spas—on me. She described how the infrared rays penetrated six to eight inches into my body. I closed my eyes as she rolled the heavy ball over my rib cage, then down, flattening my stomach. The moment—my tingling back, a stranger’s warm voice in the dark—was compelling enough to suspend my skepticism. Then the sphere edged over my hip, curving slowly along my lower abdomen, pressing against my pubic bone. Suddenly, something was happening in my, ahem, sacral chakra. My eyes popped open.

“Crazy, right?” Schoen’s gaze was like a weighted pillow. She meant the amethyst, the magical power of crystals. I nodded and smiled, fairly certain it was some other combination of charm and pressure at work on my mind and body.

An assistant opened the door and whispered, “Sharon needs the stage smudged with cinnamon again.”

Schoen apologized Zen-ly and left me clutching the ball to my belly. When I reemerged to the party, someone handed me a cocktail with fresh mint and pebbles in the bottom of the glass. I sipped through a Glacce reusable metal straw, retail $68, and wondered what the witches I knew would think of all this.

Glacce’s products are representative of the current wave of crystals in the marketplace: high-end, obsessively curated, and a blur of spirituality, health, and consumerism. Created by Schoen and Sharon Leslie in...