Right-wing personality Candace Owens is urging her fans to consume a quack medical cure known for turning users’ skin blue.
In an Instagram video posted on Thursday, Owens praised the use of colloidal silver as a daily supplement, a treatment that comes with no valid medical use and plenty of health risks.
“Yes, colloidal silver!” Owens said in the video. “I take colloidal silver every single day, I love colloidal silver. That is a great one. That is another one that people probably know nothing about.”
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While Owens and others have praised preventative use of colloidal silver as a way to stave off illness, colloidal silver has no valid medical purpose and plenty of potential dangers. In extreme cases, according to the Mayo Clinic, colloidal silver can cause seizure or organ problems.
Owens didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But colloidal silver’s most famous side effect is argyria—a condition that turns users’ skin a bluish-gray color, usually permanently. Despite those risks, colloidal silver has sometimes been embraced by political outsiders, including some libertarians seeking treatments for a variety of illnesses outside the medical system. Montana Libertarian politician Stan Jones, for example, turned his skin blue by consuming colloidal silver.
Owens laid out her colloidal silver regimen in a follow-up Instagram comment to a fan asking for more information about colloidal silver, claiming she takes a “teaspoon a day” and “more when I’m sick” in a post first highlighted by liberal activist William LeGate.
As little as that one teaspoon of silver a day could be enough to cause argyria, depending on the concentration of the silver solution. According to medical research, a 56-year-old man who took a teaspoon every day for “allergy and cold medication” noticed that his fingernails were turning blue.
Owens isn’t the only far-right figure to endorse silver as a fringe medical cure. In 2020, the FDA warned InfoWars chief Alex Jones to stop promising that silver toothpaste and other silver products sold on his website could prevent or treat the coronavirus.
Owens’s pro-colloidal silver video came days after a disastrous interview where Owens, who works for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, interviewed former President Donald Trump. In a surprise move, Trump rebuffed Owens’ criticism of the coronavirus vaccines, praising the vaccines’ results as “very good.”
In the same video in which she praised colloidal silver, Owens downplayed Trump’s support for the vaccines, claiming Trump is “too old” to read anti-vaccine information on the internet. She also attacked vaccinations more broadly, claiming, among other things, that there’s “real evil” behind tetanus shots.
