Egg Cleansing Rituals Are Going Viral but Many Are Doing It Wrong (Exclusive)

If you’ve ever scrolled through TikTok and come across an egg cleansing ritual, chances are you were intrigued.

Maybe you saw someone cracking an egg into a glass of water, interpreting cloudy whites and floating yolks. Or perhaps they threw it at a crossroads and never looked back. But what’s the real story behind this viral ritual?

“This is a very traditional Latin American cultural practice,” Bri Luna — seasoned Bruja, founder and creative director of The Hoodwitch — tells PEOPLE exclusively.

The viral content creator and author of Blood Sex Magic: Everyday Magic for the Modern Mystic has built a lifestyle brand dedicated to empowering, educating and cultivating community through meaningful rituals supporting self-care and wellness.

“The egg cleansing has always been believed to cleanse any negative energy that has been directed towards you,” Luna says. “If you’ve been in a negative situation, a place where you’re arguing a lot [or] you’re having a lot of problems in your relationships, things like that — it’s really for those around negative energy and negative environments.”

Luna, who practiced this ritual alongside her mother and grandmothers, has made it an annual tradition. “I go every New Year,” she says. “That has been my tradition with my mom, with my sister, with my friends… I’ll go into the botánica and I’ll make sure that I’m getting cleansed.”

While egg cleansing rituals have become increasingly visible on social media, often curated into short-form tutorials, Luna emphasizes that its roots are deeply ancestral and its meaning is far more spiritual than trending.

“It is a form of traditional cleansing that is most commonly done, and you’ll find it from people in Latin America,” she says, noting that while she doesn’t claim to know its exact origin, her knowledge comes from her own lineage. “My grandmother is Mexican,” she adds.

Practices like this are part of curandismo, traditional folk healing found across many Latin American cultures, blending Indigenous, African and Spanish influences.

At its core, the egg is believed to act as a channel absorbing energetic residue that may linger after emotionally or spiritually taxing experiences. Luna explains that the egg is used almost as a sort of “vacuum.”

“It’s pulling the negative energy and removing anything that has been put on you,” she says.

Whether it’s the result of envy, ill intent or simply spiritual overwhelm, the egg is used to sweep the body from head to toe, absorbing energy along the way. Some practitioners discard it immediately, often at a crossroads, while others crack it into a glass of water to interpret what remains.

According to Luna, “You’re gonna wanna have a bruja, someone to look at your egg cleansing,” she says. “Once they crack that egg into the bowl or the glass of water, it’s gonna tell you a story.”

That story, however, isn’t always easy to read, and not everyone is meant to read it. “It comes with practice,” she says. 

If you’re curious but inexperienced, Luna recommends caution. “You can do it by yourself, but it’s kind of like when you’re reading your own tarot. You want someone who has the experience to really read the egg for you, unbiased.”

The results, she warns, aren’t always subtle. In fact, they can be startling, especially when a spiritual attack or energetic interference is involved.

“If there’s someone that is doing something to you, a lot of times in that egg in the water, there’s gonna be a lot of spikes coming off of it,” Luna says. “It’s gonna look really cloudy, it looks really gross and sometimes it has blood in it. That’s what I’ve seen.”

“They may have you come back, do some candle work or some ritual baths,” she adds.

Luna urges caution when it comes to the way spiritual practices are portrayed online, especially on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where context and credibility are often missing.

“I think that with any magical practice, you really do need to consider the source,” she says. “I think it is very common right now [where] we’re seeing these very short forms of entertainment, but you don’t know them. You don’t know what they practice, you don’t know where they come from and you don’t know their level of expertise or experience.”

Luna considers egg cleansing rituals essential to one’s “spiritual hygiene.” It’s something she recommends doing regularly, even once every month. It’s not just about ritual but a kind of spiritual maintenance in a world that feels increasingly overwhelming.

“It’s a form of spiritual hygiene,” she says. “We are being constantly bombarded with media that is so negative and so destructive, I think, on everyone’s mental health right now.”

Luna doesn’t rely on a specific season or lunar phase to perform an egg cleansing — instead, she follows her intuition and encourages others to do the same. Still, for those looking to align their practice with the moon, she offers guidance:

“I will say, if you want to make it more ritualistic — and you don’t need to be initiated into any formal tradition, you don’t need to be in any religion — you can work with a dark moon. Working with a new moon is always great for cleansings, for release.”