About Aurmina
That observation, made by a Japanese pharmacist in the 1950s, is where this mineral chemistry begins. Aurmina exists because of what he found next: water that has taken something from stone behaves differently from water that has not.
Our mission
Removing contaminants is the part everyone measures, and it is the part we can prove. The panels are published, and the numbers are what they are. But it was never the whole ambition.
For most of human history, the water people drank had spent time in the ground. It moved slowly through basalt, granite and volcanic ash, sometimes for decades, and it came up carrying a broad, unhurried mineral signature the rock had given it. That water was not clean in the modern sense. It was something older and better than clean: it was conditioned. Every living thing on this planet, ourselves included, was built around what that water carried.
Almost nobody drinks it now. In two centuries we traded slow water for fast: surface water gathered in hours instead of decades, treated to remove what population and industry had put into it, and then, if we were being careful, stripped bare by reverse osmosis. Every one of those steps answered a real danger. Together they took the minerals out along with the hazards, and left us holding water that cannot hurt us and cannot help us either.
We are not making a new kind of water. We are trying to give back the kind the world used to make on its own.
Water that is redox-active, ion-exchangeable and genuinely hydrating is the ordinary condition of water that has been through rock. It is also what nearly all of us have lost. Aurmina is our attempt to run that exchange in a bottle and a day rather than in a mountain and a century.
Asao Shimanishi did not invent this. He watched rain dissolve a granite boulder and then dedicated fifteen years to devising a method for it, working out in a vessel what the earth had been doing quietly since long before there was anyone here to notice. The process is ours to run and ours to answer for. The order it draws on is not, and we regard it as something given rather than something achieved.
That is a statement of what we are building, not a claim that we have finished. We would rather be measured against the real ambition than a smaller one we could defend more easily, and we will not claim a step we have not taken.
Our story
Dr. Pierre Kory spent his career in intensive care, much of it as an ICU director. The discipline teaches one habit above all others: when a patient is failing in a dozen ways at once, resist the urge to chase each falling number and hunt instead for the single insult beneath the whole collapse. Reverse that, and the systems that looked like a dozen separate failures begin to re-coordinate on their own.
Years later, studying chronic illnesses that resist simple explanations, he kept following that instinct downward, past the symptom, past the organ, toward whatever sat underneath. In 2024 it led somewhere he did not expect: to the work of a Japanese pharmacist who had asked a similar question about a tree.
A tree growing out of bare rock. No soil, no one tending it. So where was it getting what it needed?
In the 1950s, sitting by the water in post-war Japan, Asao Shimanishi noticed a tree rising directly out of what looked like naked stone: just a crack in a granite boulder, and a trunk emerging from it. He reasoned that rainwater pooling in that crack had dissolved a little of the rock, and that the tree was living on what the water had taken from the stone.
He could not let the question go. Trained as a pharmacist, he turned away from synthetic chemistry and toward the materials that had drawn him since childhood: rocks, and the hidden processes by which the living world sustains itself. It took fifteen years. In 1977 he arrived at a method for liberating a broad spectrum of minerals out of weathered volcanic biotite and into an aqueous solution, something that had been considered impossible.
What he found next was the part that mattered. Added to water, that solution changed how the water behaved, and what changed downstream of it was not one thing but many, across systems that had nothing in common except the water running through them.
That record, largely untranslated and almost unknown outside Japan, is what Dr. Kory spent the following year reading. It produced three books, and it produced two companies, because the same chemistry turns out to serve two different mediums.
The Lineage
The chemistry is not new. What is new is that anyone outside Japan is paying attention to it.
1950s
Sitting by the water in Wakayama, Asao Shimanishi notices a tree growing from a crack in a granite boulder, with no soil beneath it. He concludes that rainwater in the crack has dissolved part of the stone.
1962-1977
He sets out to do deliberately what the rain did slowly: liberate a broad spectrum of minerals from rock into water. It takes fifteen years and an unusual amount of failure.
1977
Shimanishi arrives at an acid extraction that frees the minerals from weathered volcanic biotite and leaves them in soluble sulfate form.
1985
He founds Shimanishi Kaken and begins producing the extract, a gold-colored concentrate carrying a broad, electrically active spectrum of minerals.
1988
Patent 4,776,963 is granted to Shimanishi and co-inventors for a method of purifying water. It records that the method was novel. It is not evidence that anything performs, and we do not present it as such.
1990s
Field and laboratory reports accumulate across crops, soil, ponds and wastewater: in Japan, at the Instituto de Ingeniería in Mexico City, and later under a UNDP and Seoul National University project in Korea. Almost none of it is translated.
2014
Environmental chemist Dr. Paul Rosenfeld commissions independent laboratory analysis of treated water, and concludes it is superior to distillation and reverse osmosis because it allows the natural minerals to remain.
2024
Dr. Kory encounters the work while researching chronic illness. What holds his attention is not any single result but that independent observers, decades and disciplines apart, kept reporting movement in the same direction.
2025
Aurmina for the water people drink. Primora Bio for the water that grows things. One chemistry, two mediums.
A note on names
Forty years of licensing across four countries leaves a trail of labels. In the research literature it appears as Themarox and Seamarox, the producer’s own designations; as Mineral-22 in the Korean pilot and the 1995 UNAM photosynthesis report; and as ROX solution in the 1992 UNAM wastewater report. At retail, under successive licensees, it has been sold as Adya Clarity, Purinize, Drops of Balance and Volcanna Rain.
None of those is a different chemistry, and we would rather you heard the list from us than found it yourself. Every study we cite keeps whatever name its authors used, so you can match the document to the label rather than take our word for it.
Two products
The same extract, from the same rock, formulated for two very different jobs. Neither is a version of the other.
For the water you drink
A mineral treatment for drinking water, and a direct alternative to reverse osmosis. It binds contaminants so they can be filtered out, and leaves the minerals in rather than stripping the water bare.
For the water that grows things
A conditioner for irrigation and foliar water. It returns mineral character to water that softening, filtration and desalination have stripped, and mobilizes the nutrients a soil already holds.
Both are drawn from weathered volcanic biotite sourced in the mountains of Fukushima, Japan.
The team
Co-founder
A critical-care physician of more than twenty years, much of it as an ICU director. He found this work while looking for the thing underneath, which is the only way he knows how to look.
CEO & co-founder
Leads the company. A long-standing health advocate who has spent years on the practical side of getting difficult ideas into people’s hands.
Chief Commercial & Product Development Officer
Clinical practice partner turned operator. Runs product development and the commercial side of both brands.
Boundaries
Whether you are after cleaner water or just have a question, we are here.
