Magnetic invisibility sounds simple in theory. Place the right materials around an object and magnetic fields flow around it as if nothing were there. Reality has been far messier. For nearly two decades, physicists have tried to cloak objects from magnetic fields using carefully arranged materials. Early designs relied on idealized shapes such as perfect cylinders or spheres. Those forms behave predictably in equations and laboratory tests. Real devices rarely cooperate. Power cables twist through irregular housings. Electronic components form sharp corners. Industrial systems contain uneven edges and layered geometries. Once these shapes enter the picture, magnetic cloaking designs often fail, leaving obvious distortions in the surrounding field. Magnetic cloaking achieved using bilayer SC-SFM metastructures with different geometries. (CREDIT: Science Advances) Researchers at the University of Leicester now report a way around that problem. Their new framework, described in Science Advances, allows magnetic cloaks to be designed for objects with complex shapes using materials that already exist. Two Materials Working Together Magnetic cloaking typically relies on a pairing of two materials. The inner layer is …