What does your future soulmate look like? Is he tall, dark and handsome? What color is her hair? Do they wear glasses? On Etsy, thousands of psychics are ready and waiting to draw you a photo—for a price.
Along with homemade jewelry and 3D-printed decor, some Etsy sellers are peddling metaphysical wares. From the often-memed Etsy witches who will put a hex on your ex, along with the more familiar tarot readings and mediums who can channel messages from your dead loved ones. While selling magic is prohibited by Etsy’s terms of service, most are able to get around this with a disclaimer saying that the service provided is for entertainment only. Enter the soulmate drawings.
A search for “soulmate drawing” on Etsy turns up more than 5,000 results—ranging from less than $1 to over $1,000—from psychics who promise to, as one top-rated psychic puts it, “combine my psychic vision with artistic channeling to provide a detailed sketch and reading of your soulmate or twin flame.” Many of the drawings are made with AI, leading to a lineup of generic-looking white men who look pulled from the credits of a Ryan Murphy show.
Knowing what your soulmate looks like would undoubtedly make dating a lot easier, but can you really trust a drawing you bought from a stranger for $5.84? What if you miss out on your real soulmate because you’re looking for someone with dark, curly hair, and he’s blond?
I’m fascinated by the reviews left on the sellers’ pages, mostly from women who take the drawing as confirmation of their current, or former, relationship. “The image looks remarkably like my husband with hair.” Or, “I received this, and it was my ex bf. Him and I are together and moved into our own place together.” Others leave one-star reviews saying that the reading was overly generic and that both the reading and the image were likely AI-generated.
Despite the apparent scamminess of some sellers, others are perceived to be the real thing. Recently, a story went viral on TikTok after she got engaged to a man who looks a lot like a soulmate drawing she got done. Content creator Ashely Watson told People that it all started during a fun girls’ night in 2024.
“My friend saw the idea on TikTok,” she recalled, “but she brought it up to me and was like, ‘How funny would it be if all the single girls did this psychic reading, and we revealed them at the cabin on the big screen together?’”
In addition to the drawing, the Etsy psychic told Watson she’d meet her soulmate within three months. She met a man who looked like the drawing one week later, and now they’re engaged.
Comments on the viral story read a lot like those Etsy reviews, however, some think it’s romantic, and others think it’s a clear scam. “Go to her profile page and you’ll see … it still looks nothing like him,” wrote one People commenter.
Though, to be fair, Watson doesn’t exactly sound like a true believer either: “Whether it’s fate, coincidence, intuition, or a very talented Etsy psychic, I like leaving room for a little magic and whimsy,” she said.
In fact, buying soulmate drawings from Etsy mediums is its own genre of content creation—many by people who just want to have fun and hopefully go viral rather than those who genuinely think it’s going to help them find the love of their life.
A few women who met their partner weeks or months after getting a soulmate drawing have been featured in national media, particularly the New York Post. It has an active “psychic” section with headlines such as, “We asked a medium to hold a seance to summon the clutch spirit of late Knicks legend Willis Reed—and this time we’re not waiting for Game 7.”
Personally, my favorite genre is the one where content creators buy soulmate drawings from multiple Etsy sellers and compare them. Usually, they’re clearly of different people, even if sometimes the content creator tries to find commonalities (they’re all white men with brown hair?).
For their part, many witches and psychics active on Reddit scoff at the whole genre. “Almost all of the ones you see for sale … is a filter over a generated image,” wrote one person on r/witch. “I recently laughed my way through a Facebook thread of people who had bought similar services and ending up getting the same pictures. So I think it’s more than a bit bullshit.”
