The Science

How Aurmina works

A broad-spectrum mineral solution, drawn from volcanic biotite, doing the same chemistry the earth runs — in a glass, in minutes. Four quiet mechanisms.

Coagulation, flocculation & settling

How a few drops of mineral gather a glass of invisible contaminants into something that simply falls away.

It starts looking perfectly clean — the load is dissolved and invisible. Aurmina brings it out of solution, gathers it into floc, and drops it to the bottom, where a pour or a filter takes it away.

A glass of tap water can look perfectly clean and still carry a hidden load — a haze of particles and dissolved matter far too small to see or to catch in a filter, held in suspension because they all carry the same electrical charge, so they repel one another and never come together.

Aurmina changes that in the first minutes. Its broad spread of multivalent mineral ions — iron, aluminum, and a range of others drawn from volcanic biotite — cancels the charges that were holding everything apart. Freed of what kept them separate, the once-invisible matter comes out of solution: the particles find one another, bind, and gather into larger and larger clusters called floc, which — now far heavier than the water around them — sink.

What looks, for an hour or two, like the water getting cloudier is the opposite. It’s the water letting go of a burden it had been holding invisibly all along. When the floc settles, the water above is clear — and a simple pour or a gravity filter takes the rest.

For the curious

This is coagulation and flocculation — the same process municipal treatment plants have relied on for more than a century, and the same one a river runs when its mineral load meets a plume of sediment. Coagulation neutralizes the electrostatic repulsion between colloidal particles; flocculation lets the destabilized particles bridge and aggregate into settleable floc.

The difference is the reagent. Conventional plants dose a single synthetic coagulant (typically alum or a ferric salt). Aurmina brings a broad, mineral-spectrum charge sourced from volcanic biotite — twenty-nine individually measured elements in soluble sulfate form — so the same clarification happens without a manufactured additive, and the water is left with a light, balanced mineral character rather than stripped bare. No pressure, no membrane, no power: just the mineral, time, and gravity.

Redox & oxidative balance

How electron chemistry breaks down what’s dissolved in your water — and leaves it in balance rather than running wild.

The same electron activity that makes dissolved oxygen reactive enough to break down organic matter is held, by the mineral, in a balanced middle — enough to clean, not enough to run wild.

Redox — short for reduction-oxidation — is simply the movement of electrons from one substance to another. It’s one of the most basic reactions in nature: it’s how fire burns, how iron rusts, and how your own cells turn food into energy.

Aurmina is built largely from redox-active minerals — iron, manganese, titanium and their cousins, the elements whose whole role in chemistry is shuttling electrons. In water, that electron activity does something useful: it makes dissolved oxygen more reactive, and that reactive oxygen breaks apart dissolved organic matter that ordinary settling leaves untouched. Oxidation, doing visible work.

But oxidation left unchecked is destructive — it’s the runaway process behind spoilage and corrosion. The value of a well-matched, mineral-buffered redox system is that it holds the electron flow where it belongs: reactive enough to break down what shouldn’t be there, balanced enough not to turn on everything else. That balance is what redox-balanced water means — and it’s measurable, as the water’s oxidation-reduction potential, or ORP.

For the curious

In Shimanishi’s wastewater work the redox character was unmistakable. Using electron-spin resonance, he detected signals consistent with hydroxyl-radical formation after the mineral was added — one of the most reactive oxidizing species there is — appearing where there had been none, and strengthening as the dose rose. That reactive oxygen oxidizes dissolved organics, and clarification follows.

Redox is directional. Where heavily burdened water shows the oxidative side — tearing organic matter apart — the same mineral chemistry shows a reductive, protective side in other systems: agricultural studies report higher antioxidant capacity and lower oxidative-stress markers in treated crops. Same electron chemistry, opposite direction, set by the medium it’s working in.

Antioxidant-capacity and oxidative-stress findings described here are from agricultural research on treated crops, not on people. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Exchange capacity

What the water has to trade — and why stripped water has nothing.

Exchange takes two parties: a charged surface, and ions in the water available to swap onto it. Reverse osmosis removes the second one.

Ion exchange is the quiet trade that happens wherever water meets a mineral surface: one charged ion swaps places with another. It is how a soil releases what it holds, how a zeolite softens hard water, how a clay lattice takes up a metal. And it takes two parties — a charged surface, and ions in the water available to make the swap.

Water supplies the other half of the trade, and that is the half reverse osmosis removes. Push water through an RO membrane and what comes out is a solvent with almost nothing dissolved in it: no cations to offer, no anions to give up, nothing to trade with any surface it later meets. Its exchange capacity is not low. It is essentially zero. That is a measurable fact about the water, not an opinion about it.

Aurmina-treated water is the opposite case. It carries twenty-nine measured elements in soluble sulfate form — dissolved and charged rather than suspended as particles — which is precisely the condition in which ions are available to exchange. Whatever surface the water meets next, it arrives with something to offer.

Exchange also does real work during treatment. As aluminum and iron hydrolyze into hydroxide and hydroxysulfate solids, they present an enormous adsorbing surface, and dissolved contaminants — organic acids, phosphate, trace metals — bind and exchange onto it on the way out of the water. That is the step by which dissolved material leaves, rather than merely settling.

For the curious

Exchange capacity has a name and a unit. In soils it is measured as cation exchange capacity, in centimoles of charge per kilogram — cmol(+)/kg. Water has no single standard figure, but the ingredients are countable: which ions are present, at what charge, at what concentration. Aurmina’s are on the certificate of analysis. Reverse osmosis water’s list is empty — which is why deionized water is used in laboratories as blank water, the reference against which everything else is measured.

What we are not claiming here. Exchange capacity is a property of the water, and it can be measured. What it amounts to once the water is inside a body is a different question, belonging to biology rather than water chemistry, and we do not have the evidence to answer it. Where this chemistry’s exchange behavior has been studied at length is in soil — where the surface is real, large and straightforward to sample. That work belongs to Primora Bio, our agricultural company, and we deliberately keep it there rather than borrowing it for a glass of drinking water.

Hydration shells & mineral order

The subtlest mechanism of all — how the right ions shape the way water organizes itself, the quality it has coming straight off living rock.

Aurmina’s minerals arrive as sulfates — cosmotropic, order-promoting ions that sit at the ordering end of the Hofmeister series, nudging water toward the tight, well-organized state of a rock-fed spring.

Every ion in water gathers a shell of water molecules around it — a hydration shell. But not all ions organize water the same way. Some, called cosmotropic — “order-makers” — pull the surrounding water into a tight, orderly arrangement. Others, chaotropic — “disorder-makers” — leave it loose and scattered.

Which ions do which was mapped more than a century ago as the Hofmeister series. Sulfate — the form Aurmina’s minerals arrive in — sits firmly at the ordering end. So the ions Aurmina brings don’t just dissolve in your water; they nudge its very structure toward the organized, tightly-hydrated state found in water that has spent long contact with rock.

This is the hardest of the four mechanisms to see and the easiest to taste: it’s a large part of why lightly, broadly mineralized water tastes smooth and faintly sweet, while stripped water tastes flat.

Taste is subjective and varies with source water, dose and contact time. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Independent verification

An outside chemist looked at it too.

Everything above is how Aurmina works. Separately from the contaminant panels, an independent environmental chemist commissioned his own laboratory analysis of treated water — and reached his own conclusion about it.

Dr. Paul E. Rosenfeld, PhD

Principal Environmental Chemist · Soil / Water / Air Protection Enterprise

PhD, Soil Chemistry — University of Washington, with doctoral research on VOC filtration
MS, Environmental Science — UC Berkeley
Former UCLA environmental-chemistry faculty, teaching exposure and risk assessment to graduate students and physicians
25+ years in contaminant fate, transport & water-quality analysis; expert witness in state and federal courts

In 2014, Rosenfeld commissioned an independent analysis of treated water through TestAmerica Laboratories in Sacramento — a full ICP-MS elemental panel by EPA Method 6020, run under his own firm rather than ours. He was not measuring contaminant removal; he was measuring what the treated water carried. The conclusion below is his, drawn from those results.

TestAmerica job 320-8220-1, ICP Analysis of Liquid Samples, 8 July 2014. Three water samples, elemental analysis by EPA Method 6020 (ICP-MS). The contaminant-reduction figures shown elsewhere on this site are a separate body of work, measured by Envirotek Laboratories, Inc. (Mullica Hill, NJ; EPA ID NJ01298) between 2008 and 2015 using EPA and NSF/ANSI methods. Certificate of Analysis (PDF) →

“One of the best defenses against the harmful effects of water contamination — superior to distillation and reverse osmosis, because it allows the natural minerals to remain in the water.”

Dr. Paul Rosenfeld, PhD — environmental chemist, on Aurmina-treated water

Figures describe water-quality testing only and are not health claims. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Four mechanisms, one glass of water.

Contaminants bound and dropped, organics broken down, minerals mobilized, and the water left organized the way it comes off living rock — all from a few drops.

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