If you thought it was a Tomato Girl Summer, or a Euro Summer, or even a Dua Lipa Summer, I’m afraid you’re wrong. This summer belongs to the Etsy witch.
While witches for hire have been selling their wares (mysterious tinctures, incantations, the odd curse or crystal) for a few years on Etsy, since May, there’s been a huge uptick in orders for one thing in particular: the promise of a perfect wedding day. Around the world, anxious brides-to-be are sliding into the DMs of ‘casters’ and ordering personalised spells, in the hopes that a power beyond our realm will help their weddings go off without a hitch. It’s a day people tend to spend masses of time and money on – what’s an extra £6.99 for peace of mind?
It all started with influencer Jaz Smith, who live-posted her wedding day on TikTok at the end of May. One post drew more than a million views: a playful admission that she’d “paid an Etsy witch for good weather”, and it worked. The comments flooded with “drop the link girl, I’m getting married soon!” until she shared the shopfront of NaturalisticBlessing – a UK-based witch and tarot reader who soon had so many orders she was forced to pause trading.
Etsy technically banned the sale of ‘spiritual and metaphysical services’ back in 2015, but many in the world of tarot, Wicca and alternative therapies teamed up to oppose it. Today, with hundreds of witchcraft practitioners selling ‘perfect weather spells’ and ‘rituals for calm, love and harmony on your special day on the platform’, the hype around pre-marital magic has only built: Google searches for “Etsy witches” have risen 80% since the end of June.
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Brontë King, a content creator and founder from London who got married in Croatia last month, said she stumbled onto WitchTok on the same day she found out her wedding was due to collide with the worst storm the country had seen all year. “It was a complete nightmare; we were asking all our family and friends to fly out for this beautiful summer wedding, and now a freak storm was threatening to ruin the whole day,” she says. “Everything had been planned to take place outdoors, from the sit-down dinner to the aisle itself, which was set up on a jetty going out into the water.”
She heard people were paying witches online and decided it was a sign. “I’d been using Etsy for so many wedding bits – personalised favours and things like that – so it didn’t feel that different to find a seller who offered ‘good weather spells’ and add one to basket,” she says. “It was the first time I’d ever done something like that; I’m not big into spiritual stuff, but I have always believed in manifesting and the idea that what you put out into the universe will come back to you. I just thought, why not? I’ll try anything at this point.”
