Permanent magnets and quantum spin I've seen where people have asked about how permanent magnets work, and the answer given is that on the atomic level, the electron spins have all been oriented in substantially the same direction.
This suggests to me that a single atom of iron is a dipole.  It also suggests that if iron were heated to a gaseous state, the individual atoms would tend to orient themselves to form a gas with a single north and south pole.  Does this happen?
 A: A lot of atoms by themselves are magnetic dipoles because of the electron configuration in their valence shell. However this does not mean that they are all ferromagnetic like iron. Iron and other elements like it only tend to exhibit magnetic properties because of their crystal structures and the alignment of the domains within the material. 
Liquids and gases do not tend to exhibit this behavior because their atoms are not fixed in a highly ordered lattice like in solid iron. While magnetic effects can be observed for molten or gaseous elements they are usually due to electromagnetic induction. For the case of the earth's core for example it is suspected that there is self-sustaining feedback of the moving charges creating a magnetic field which induces a flow of charge and so on.
Minute Physics has a great video explaining magnetic effects in ferromagnetic solids and it may help you understand why ferromagnetism is not observed in disordered states such as in gases. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM 
