Imagine the world if innocent non-magical folk had access to any of these…

They can’t do spells, none of their photos move and, let’s face it, their idea of magic is pulling lots and lots of handkerchiefs out of a sleeve. As such, Muggles should in no way, shape or form ever be trusted with wizarding potions. Because if any of these were to fall into Muggle hands, and then past their lips, the results would be disastrous…

Felix Felicis

A world in which we’re all lucky, everyone’s a winner and everything goes exactly our way: sounds like Utopia, doesn’t it? But it would actually, very likely, be chaos. What would happen, for example, if five people went for their dream job and four of them were taking Felix Felicis? Would they all get the job? How would that even work? Or, of course, knowing Muggles, the most likely scenario would be that Felix Felicis would be incredibly expensive, meaning you would have to be lucky in the first place to be wealthy enough to afford it. And we all know how that ends: the lucky just get luckier – and probably at the expense of the unluckiest in society.

A bottle of Felix Felicis

Beautification Potion

The Beautification Potion is exactly what it sounds like: a potion that makes the user beautiful. It erases blemishes, it whitens teeth, it transforms bodies into those of Greek statues. Its users reach the apex of conventional beauty. In Muggle terms, it’s basically a Snapchat filter. But given how image-obsessed Muggle society is, would they be able to handle such a concoction? We’d guess not. In fact, we’d go as far to say that such a universal standard of superficial beauty would only end up making Muggles uglier – making them lose all perspective of what real beauty is.

Love Potions

Well, this… this is just a disaster waiting to happen. Muggles can barely be trusted with natural love, never mind a bottled version that can be used to manipulate the feelings of whoever they like – or, rather, love. And how do we know this? Because wizards can’t be trusted with Love Potions either. Take Merope Gaunt, the witch who allegedly used a Love Potion to make Tom Riddle Sr fall in love with her. Some speculate that it is because of the deceptive nature of this union that Gaunt gave birth to one of the most famous Dark wizards who ever lived, Lord Voldemort. In short: nobody should have Love Potions at all.

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Polyjuice Potion

A world in which Muggles have access to the Polyjuice Potion would probably not be all that different to the wizarding world having access to the Polyjuice Potion. The only difference is, it would be much worse. There would still be bank robberies, for example: except in the Muggle world this also means no way to identify criminals through CCTV, or to ever be able to trust DNA evidence ever again. In other words, it would lead to identity theft on a whole other level. And that’s without taking into account the potential for accidents, the potential for thousands upon thousands of Muggles to inadvertently splice themselves with a cat, and the potential for thousands upon thousands of Muggles to do that deliberately.

Elixir of Life

The Elixir of Life has caused many problems in the wizarding world – most of them to do with Lord Voldemort – but it’s hard not to imagine it full-on destroying the Muggle world. How do we know this? Because the Elixir of Life is already known of in the Muggle world as a legend, a myth – and Muggles have destroyed themselves trying to prove it exists. Take the emperors of ancient China, many of whom believed the Elixir to be real. One emperor, Qin Shi Huang (mostly remembered now for his Terracotta Army), even sent out thousands of people in search of the Elixir – none of whom came back (but, if legend is to be believed, they did find Japan). As for Qin himself, he persevered in his search by commissioning alchemists to make their own versions of the Elixir of Life. It’s said he died from drinking one – unsurprisingly, as it contained mercury.

Now imagine if Muggles had actually found the Elixir. How many wars would be fought over it? How many tyrants, how many Muggle Lord Voldemorts would it give rise to? No – much like the wizarding world, the Muggle world is better off without immortality.

Harry Potter to Fantastic Beasts