How It All Started

My name is Julie-Anne, and I'm a registered nurse specialising in emergency care, a path I started in 2019. In 2022, I began training as a cosmetic injector; a new chapter, but not my first business. Before nursing took hold, I worked as an eyelash technician all through university, gradually folding it in around my nursing shifts as both grew.

Toward the end of my years as a lash tech, I started experiencing intense back pain. It wasn't subtle… it affected my small business, and eventually, it started affecting my quality of life. Between 2022 and 2025, I bounced between medical appointments trying to find an answer, and each time, I was told it was likely tied to my work. I don't blame any of those medical professionals for that. I was young, fit, and healthy, working as a nurse where manual handling is part of the job and long hours on your feet by a bed are just normal. Honestly, I believed it too. It made sense.

In the middle of all of this, COVID hit. I kept working hard, and without a break because my patients and my colleagues needed every set of hands they could get. I did that for three years straight without taking leave. Looking back, it's not surprising that it ended in burnout.

At my lowest point, I decided to try one more time to get an answer. That's when I met a medical practitioner who took the pain seriously in a different way. She suspected I might have Ankylosing Spondyloarthritis (AS). I went through the testing, and there it was. The answer, finally.

Being diagnosed with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) closely related to ankylosing spondyloarthritis (AS) was life changing. The constant pain, the flare-ups, the upset stomach, the stiff joints, the blood tests, the medications… it was a lot to carry all at once.

For those who don't know, axSpA is a form of inflammatory arthritis that mainly affects the spine and the sacroiliac joints (SI); the joints connecting the base of your spine to your pelvis. It's a systemic disease, meaning it can affect other parts of the body too, and there are two types: ankylosing spondylitis, where damage shows up on an X-ray, and nonradiographic axSpA, where it doesn't show on X-ray but can be picked up through symptoms, blood tests, and MRI. Beyond the joints, it can also cause inflammation elsewhere in the body, most commonly the eyes and neck. 

Over time, if the disease progresses, the body tries to heal the inflamed areas by forming new bone which can gradually bridge the small gaps between the vertebrae and fuse sections of the spine together. That's often where the stiffness and reduced mobility come from. The rib cage can be affected too, sometimes making it harder to take a full breath. It's worth saying though, not everyone with the non-radiographic form goes on to develop the more advanced, X-ray-visible version, and this disease can look different from person to person.

Right now, there's no cure for axSpA. My treatment plan includes oral immunosuppressants and monthly injections, aimed at slowing the disease's progression. But even with treatment, I still get random flare-up, intense lower back pain, sharp pain when I walk, pain at the base of my neck, and it doesn't stop there either, sometimes moving into the joints in my arms and legs. It's unpredictable, and that's something I've had to learn to live alongside rather than around.

With my health declining in 2023-2025, I made the decision to step away from emergency care nursing, temporarily, to focus on my physical and mental health.

What helped me?

During my painful flare-ups, one of the things I found that actually helped ease and reduce the pain was taking long, warm to hot baths. Similar to using heat packs, the warmth of the water seemed to calm things down and take the edge off the inflammation. I found it worked even better once I started adding around 250g of magnesium to the bath, initially just thinking it would help with muscle recovery. That's what sent me down the rabbit hole of researching what magnesium does in the body. 

And so, I began digging into the benefits of magnesium more…

What I found was that magnesium is involved in an enormous number of processes in the body. It's a cofactor for hundreds of enzymatic reactions, and it plays a central role in how our cells produce energy, how muscles contract and relax, and how nerves fire. It's also closely tied to inflammation: research has linked low magnesium levels in the body to higher markers of inflammation and oxidative stress. Reading through it, a lot of pieces started clicking into place… the muscle relaxation, the calming feeling, why my body seemed to respond the way it did.

What I want to be upfront about, though, is that most of this research looks at magnesium in the body, through diet, blood levels, and oral supplementation. Not necessarily magnesium absorbed through the skin during a bath. That's a genuinely different question, and one I haven't found strong research on either way. So, what I can tell you honestly is this: adding magnesium to my baths is something that helped me, alongside the warmth of the water itself, and it sent me down a path of understanding why magnesium matters in the body more broadly. I can't tell you it will do the same for your flare-up, your pain, or your condition… only that it became part of how I built my own ritual of managing mine.

That's the story behind Restore. Recharge. Recover. It didn't start as a product idea… it started as something I needed for myself, on the nights my body was asking more of me than usual. Magnesium chloride, pink Himalayan salt, and bentonite clay and a little bit of botanicals went into this soak because they're what I reached for in my own bath, long before I ever thought about bottling it.

I want to be honest about what this product is, and what it isn't. This isn't a treatment for axSpA, or for any other condition. It's not going to stop a flare-up, and it won't replace the medication or the medical care that actually manages my disease day to day. What it is, is a ritual… a way to slow down, sit in some warmth, and give your body a bit of care on the days it needs it. That's what it's always been for me, and that's what I hope it can be for you too.

If you're living with chronic pain, an autoimmune condition, or anything else that flares up unpredictably… I see you! I hope this soak can be one small, warm part of how you look after yourself, alongside whatever your treatment team has you doing. It's not a fix. It's just a moment.