Reading news about Miranda Kerr usually raises more questions than it answers—namely, “Who is she?” and, “What does she want?” But, today, the number-one Miranda Kerr–related question on my mind is, “Are electromagnetic field detectors full of shit?”
A NewBeauty interview from earlier this year kicked up a micro-wellness news cycle after New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz tweeted excerpts from it on Tuesday, in which the 36-year-old Australian model revealed an extensive list of wellness “musts,” including radiation protection stickers for the back of her cell phone, alkaline water filters, and burning Palo Santo to “clear the energy in the space”—an Indigenous American practice that, like burning sage, has become trendy among white people and other wellness fetishists in recent years.
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One of Kerr’s wellness secrets stands head and shoulders above the rest, however. “I have the [electromagnetic field] detector that picks up the waves in the air,” she told NewBeauty. “I’ve had the whole house checked by a professional who looks for things like EMF waves and things like that.”
In case you don’t know what she’s talking about, an EMF detector is a device that’s used to measure electromagnetic fields produced by microwave ovens, television screens, power lines, mobile phones, and other sources of alternating currents in order to diagnose problems with those devices. The Earth’s magnetic field also produces an electromagnetic field, but EMF detectors don’t pick up on that, because it’s a stationary current, which means…honestly, this is all super over my head; io9 does a better job explaining it than I ever could.
Anyway, you’re probably more familiar with EMF detectors than you think. They’re the same thing that those reality show ghost hunters use to allegedly hunt for all those alleged ghosts. I don’t think that the “professional” Kerr was talking about, “who,” she said, “looks for things like EMF waves and things like that,” was a ghost hunter (talk about burying the lede, if she were), but it’s not exactly clear why she paid for said professional’s services or installed EMF detectors in her home at all. Some wellness enthusiasts claim that the EMF waves produced by everyday household items, like computers and microwaves, create “hidden toxins,” but decades of research have yet to turn up any proven health risks associated with exposure to such low-level fields, per the World Health Organization.
So…what’s the deal? Only Miranda Kerr, whose name happens to be an anagram for “nadir marker,” can say for sure. I reached out to the Australian model’s publicist to clarify, well, everything, and I’ll be sure to update if I ever hear back.
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