It’s Valentine’s Day season so that means we’re thinking about love. True love. True lust. Happily Ever Afters. Happy For Nows. Broken hearts and hopeful gazes. And anyone who has ever suffered through the dumpster fire that is the dating world is also likely thinking about—wishing for?—some sort of magical potion or spell that would make the search for love just a little easier. Make us feel more confident. Sexier. Attractive—or somehow able to attract the kind of partner we’re looking for.
It’s the kind of wishful thinking that’s ripe for storytelling. In stories, we get all the fun of indulging in this too-good-to-be-true magical solution to our mundane romantic woes and none of the risks. One carefully cast spell could make the person you’re crushing on fall for you, like in Teen Witch (1989). Side effects include better outfits and epic dance-offs. And a conscience. Eventually, if you are at all a good person, you have to realize that giving your crush the equivalent of a magical roofie probably isn’t the best way to find true love.
Or maybe, if you’re not quite as wholesome as our little teen witch, that’s exactly what you want to do, as The Love Witch (2016) plays out. It’s less about the man and more about the need to be the center of someone’s world. To take power in being an object of desire. Of course, that too, has its side effects, like spontaneous combustion and downward-spiraling insanity for those hit with our love witch’s magic. That’s the thing with manufactured love: It can never be sustained. Like a bad come-on line, it never quite works and always leaves you feeling a little sullied.
Cooking up edible love spells…
Sometimes, though, love spells are accidental. Sometimes, you accidentally cook all your passionate feelings into your quail with rose sauce, so your whole family (except the icy matriarchy) feels so much overpowering passion that your sister sheds her clothes, causes the outhouse to burst into flames, and runs away with a passing soldier. Or maybe that’s just the case for the heroine in Like Water for Chocolate, both Laura Esquivel’s book and the film adaptation (both 1992), but which the film so exquisitely depicts. Sometimes we conjure the thing we feel we can’t have and others benefit from that unintentional enchantment. Food is one of the most common forms of spell-work after all, as we take ingredients and our feelings and stir them into something magical.
Sometimes, wishes are small quiet things written under the guise of protecting your heart, like the chocolate witch in Laura Florand’s The Chocolate Kiss (2012) where wishes can be whispered into chocolat chaud and love is as sweet and sensuous as a handcrafted macaron…if you can let your guard down enough to be tempted. Or this love magic is born from desperation and a desire to be simply irresistible to the person you’re crushing on, just like the budding chef in Simply Irresistible (1999). Clearly, food magic is a topic for a whole other essay, but for now, let’s just say that food and love are closely linked.
We also have romantic spells born out of heartfelt pain. Take little Sally Owens in the 1998 film adaptation of Practical Magic, for example. Love is unpredictable, something that makes you wild—a terrifying thought for a young girl who wants nothing more than a normal life. And yet, as we’ll later see, she unconsciously conjures the one wild, unpredictable thing that will make her normal life worth living—and just a little more magical.
And sometimes, these love spells are about self-love, in the form of sensual body lotions, like in Tasha L. Harrison’s A Taste of Her Own Medicine (2019). The heroine slathers herself in her own magical concoction not to seduce the man she’s lusting after, but to give herself permission to be a passionate woman and to revel in her own sensuality. Her love potion, of sorts, is for her and her alone—and leads to fantastic consequences as she learns to open herself to love. That’s what makes it the best kind of love spell.
What you need is Love Potion No. 9…
One of the most iconic and hilarious examples of love spells in popular culture is the 1992 movie Love Potion No. 9, based on the song of the same name. It’s got it all, from the frothy wish-fulfillment fun of taking dating anxiety off the table and being able to get whoever you want without really having to try. It’s also got the inevitable downside of anything that seems too good to be true, namely the consent issues inherent in any type of love magic that’s designed to manipulate someone else. Love Potion No. 9 expertly grapples with these issues in the way only a cheesy 90s movie can—with gusto and some genuine B movie wisdom.
Seriously, what doesn’t this movie have? It’s got magical potions! It’s got romantic fantasies galore! It’s got Sandra Bullock! And strange gypsies! (Yeah, I guess “gypsy” is kind of considered a slur now for the Romani, but that doesn’t stop pop culture from using the gypsy other as a catch-all term for “strange non-white magics” in the same way they use voodoo. But that’s another conversation for another time. Sigh.) But most of all, this movie has geeky scientists willing to experiment on themselves (read use the love potion) for the greater good of humanity!
It’s FOR SCIENCE.
Here’s what I love about this movie: It takes the simple premise of wishing there was a magical potion that would make a person more attractive to potential partners, here the opposite sex, since this is a very 90s het-cis movie. All dating anxiety vanishes because you don’t have to be funny, or sexy, or even all that interesting to be attractive as the narrator explains. You just have to open your potion-coated mouth and—voilà!—you’ve cast a love spell on whoever you desire.
The protagonists, Paul (Tate Donovan) and Diane (Sandra Bullock), are also very relatable in their search for love. Diane is in a terrible “situationship” with Gary, which is really more of a string of booty calls. Paul can't seem to approach women without breaking into hives (thankfully this movie deals with his shyness without sliding into incel territory).
The plot twist? These two nerdy scientists are actually perfect for each other if they could just get out of their own way long enough to see it. Instead, they end up being partners in crime, studying the effects of the love potion Paul got from the gypsy and, frankly, enjoying the new power they have in being desirable with a spray that’s the equivalent of a romantic breath mint. It’s literally that simple: Spray the magic into your mouth, speak, and the lovers will follow. The only catch is that this love potion only lasts four hours.
So this isn’t like Teen Witch or other movies that feature one protagonist using love magic on one person to artificially win their love. Instead, they both indulge in the fantasy of their hearts’ desires but never with each other. In fact, they make it a point never to speak to one another when they are “under the influence” of this magical potion. It’s perhaps the only rule they adhere to so that neither feels disempowered by the other.
There’s a fun intimacy that develops between the two since they are the only ones who know the secret to their romantic success…and it really goes to show that all they needed was a little confidence and a playful spirit to get what they really wanted: each other.
But before we can get to their HEA, we have a lot of fun reveling in many a romantic fantasy, the biggest being Diane’s make-over. In a way that only Sandra Bullock can pull off (okay, and Audrey Hepburn and Anne Hathaway), Diane goes from a frumpy nerd to a sexy and beautiful confident woman. Yeah, it’s a problematic trope but I’m a sucker for it!
Diane dates a rich man and then a prince, both of whom shower her in gifts, from jewels and fancy dresses to her complete cosmetic makeover. And while there are consumerist underpinnings to these fantasies, there’s also this sense that Diane is, for perhaps the first time, being appreciated, cared for, and adored. She is literally fulfilling many a stereotypical romance fantasy, right down to getting your tool of an ex to realize just how great you are.
Paul, on the other hand, epitomizes a very human revenge fantasy. He makes a woman who publicly and painfully rejected him do everything she can to make him hers. This scene stays on the right side of funny because the woman was truly awful and went out of her way to publicly humiliate him during their first encounter when he did nothing but be his awkward self. He also doesn’t sleep with her. He just rejects her and does a happy dance in the street afterward. It’s a great scene that keeps him from falling into the creepy nice guy territory. Then he does some typical sex fantasy stuff worthy of any porno—the sorority house orgy being the highlight.
And yet, what all these fantasies do in this movie is highlight that what really matters is genuine affection and love, as we see when the two protagonists get together and fall madly in love simply by being themselves without the help of a potion. In fact, the real magic this potion works is helping them relax enough to actually talk and get to know one another.
The second half of the movie does a great job of looking at the other side of this gypsy-gifted potion when Gary exacts his revenge on Diane by hitting her with some of the love potion. After a non-potion-induced magical time with Paul, she suddenly decides to return to Gary and, in fact, plans to marry him. Then Paul gets whammied too when a prostitute and petty criminal hits him with the love potion and strips him of his valuables.
It’s all fun and games when you’re the one using the love option, but it’s actually kind of scary and awful when someone is using it on you!
Paul realizes that he never wants to be on the receiving end of that kind of magic—realizes, too, that’s how many of his conquests must feel, and how Diane would feel once she falls out from under Gary’s spell.
In the end, Paul rescues Diane, they get their love—without the potion. Oh, and the prostitute gets doused in the stuff and has her fun with a hoard of men at her beck and call, a reminder that we can still have fun with this love potion trope while also realizing that the ephemeral thing we want—love—can’t be bottled or commodified.
I wished for you, too…
On the flip side of Love Potion No. 9’s manufactured romance, we have Practical Magic (another Bullock classic). Little Sally’s love spell is perhaps the best example in pop culture of what this bruja would call an ethical love spell.
By this point in the movie, Sally knows her mother died of a broken heart and the women in her family are cursed to be unhappy in love. She’s even witnessed her aunts help more than a few lovesick women with their magic. Her sister Gillian can’t wait to experience love. Sally, on the other hand, is terrified of what it might do to her.
So she does what any witch would do. She crafts a love spell. As she collects white rose petals from her balcony and a variety of other ingredients, she lists all the traits of an impossible love in the way only a young girl can. He must be able to ride a horse backward, flip pancakes in the air, be incredibly kind. His favorite shape must be a start. And he should have one green eye and one blue.
When Gillian exclaims that those traits are impossible, Sally replies, “That’s the point. The guy I dreamed up doesn’t exist. If he doesn't exist, I won’t die of a broken heart.”
But he does exist.
Later in the movie, we meet Gary (this time a good Gary), who is a sheriff looking for Gillian’s evil—and dead—ex. He can flip pancakes. He has one green eye and one blue eye. And his sheriff’s badge is in the shape of a star, so it isn’t a reach to assume he likes the shape a lot.
Of course, Sally being Sally, she doesn’t trust that their attraction is real. She fears her spell is the only thing making him want to stay, in the same way her aunts bespelled her to fall in love earlier in the film. She’s also afraid of the curse that will once again break her heart.
This is the point of the film where Gary works a little magic of his own.
He tells Sally, “Curses only have power when you believe in them and I don’t.”
As any witch will tell you, belief is half of the battle when it comes to conjuring—or breaking—spells.
And then he goes on to say, “You know what? I wished for you, too.”
*pauses to dry eyes before continuing to type*
That’s a pivotal moment in the movie because it tells Sally—and the viewer—that it’s not just Sally working her magic. Love is its own ungovernable force, its own kind of magic that even the most mundane human can conjure. So their meeting is pure synchronous magic not just because Sally wished for him but because he wished for her, too.
SWOON.
It’s romantic conjuring at its finest: When you want someone—even if you don’t know who they are yet—that you cast that energy out into the universe and open yourself to the possibility of the thing. Even young Sally didn’t realize what she was conjuring with her original love spell. Consciously she might have been trying to protect herself from heartbreak. Unconsciously? She wanted a love so strong—something that seemed so unreal to her at the time—that it would help her break the love curse on the Owen’s women. No more curse, no more heartbreak.
That’s how the universe works: You wish for what you think you want and it gives you what you need. Sally’s spell did protect her from future romantic heartbreak not because this dream man didn’t exist, but because Gary and his love helped Sally to break the generational cycle of generational trauma. If that doesn’t make you swoon or sign or even cry a little, then there’s no help for you.
Love is its own kind of magic…
However you look at love magic in pop culture, one thing is for sure: Love is its own kind of magic, one you can’t control, quantify, or force. If this bruja is going to get a little After School Special about it, the best love magic is the kind that comes synchronously, naturally, when we allow ourselves to just be ourselves and let relationships develop out of mutual interest and a willingness to be vulnerable and open. Also pants feelings! Easier said than done, of course. All you have to do is Google “dating tips” or open any lifestyle magazine to get 100 tips on how to be sexy or get the one you want—or think you want. I mean, sometimes the person you’re lusting after is more a bunch of projected fantasies in human form than a living breathing person you can actually connect with. Other times, the one you’re looking for is right in front of you if you’d just be open to it.
Let’s face it, if love were easy, we’d all have it. Which is what makes love magic so damn tempting. Sally’s kind of love magic is something we all aspire to (if you’re romantically inclined). But it’s a lot harder to cast and takes longer to be fulfilled.
As for a potion that can lower your inhibitions and make you desirable to others?
It’s called alcohol. That, too, only lasts about four hours.
The Bruja Professor, a witchy take on literature, the occult & pop culture, is the scholarly sister to Enchantment Learning & Living, an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.
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