Do ionic foot baths actually detox you?

No, not in the way they're marketed. The water discoloring during a session is not toxins leaving the body. It's electrolysis: running current through salt water rapidly corrodes the device's metal electrode array, and the resulting brown or orange color comes from that corrosion, not from anything pulled through the skin. A controlled study published in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health ran the same device with and without feet in the water and found no meaningful difference in what showed up afterward. The elements detected matched the stainless steel composition of the electrode itself. The color-based "which organ is detoxing" charts sold with these devices aren't measuring anything real.