in today's video we're going to take a look at what we mean by a magnetic material and the differences between permanent magnets and induced magnets now one of the confusing things about magnetism is that not all magnetic materials are actually magnets an actual magnet is any object that produces a magnetic field while a magnetic material is any object that can be influenced by a magnetic field and has the potential to become a magnet when we talk about which elements are magnetic we're often referring to which ones are magnetic materials not necessarily magnets for example even though nickel is a magnetic material only some pieces of nickel will actually be magnets the other common magnetic elements to know are cobalt and iron and the alloys of these elements like steel also count as magnetic materials and to help you remember this group just remember that the first letters of each of the words spells ncis when we think about magnets like a common bar magnet what we're really thinking about are permanent magnets which produce their own magnetic field all the time there are another group of magnets though which we call induced or temporary magnets which only have a magnetic field temporarily these are made when a piece of magnetic material which wasn't actually a magnet like your average piece of nickel is put into the field of a permanent magnet this induces the piece of magnetic material to develop its own magnetic field with its own north and south pole and thus we call it an induced magnet and the key point to remember with induced magnets is that the force between a permanent and induced magnets will always be attractive which is why the left side of our piece of nickel became a north pole rather than a south pole if we then remove the induced magnet from the magnetic field though then it will lose its magnetism some magnetic materials like nickel and iron lose their magnetism really quickly and we call these magnetically soft materials others though like steel lose it more slowly and recall these ones magnetically hard materials anyway that's all for this video so if you enjoyed it then please do give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time