Let’s Get Metaphysical

What it’s like to get your aura photographed

For a few feverish months in 1975, Americans could not get enough of mood rings. They were relatively cheap to make, consisting of little more than a glass bauble with a small liquid crystal thermometer inside that changed colors with the crude temperature fluctuations of the wearer. The ring sold some 40 million units shortly after its debut, and the resulting cultural craze can be credited to stressed out stockbroker turned inventor, Joshua Reynolds, who claimed the rings could help reveal the wearer’s emotional state; limited, rather conveniently, to seven moods, each reflected by a different color.

To me, the mood ring is sort of the perfect encapsulation of 1970s America’s obsession with the self, evoking a mix of fascination and repulsion for all the manifestations of slick new agey spiritualism that would follow in subsequent decades: Putumayo World Music, the Goop Industrial Complex, and now, the $65 aura photo.

I spent my childhood in Northern California more or less awash in this stuff; the woo woo is so thick in the air, you can’t go three blocks without tripping into a crystal shop. I never owned a mood ring, but I have done hard time at an ashram my father frequented for meditation services surrounded by my natural enemies, apolitical hippies, and the last time I was in India, an elderly astrologer and I were ready to rumble in front of a crowd because I may have asked him too many pointed questions about the validity of his predictions. So, I’ve seen some shit.

But somewhere buried deep amidst my reflexive allergy to all things New Age, lies a strange fondness for these occult-ish ventures. Which is, I suppose, how I ended up volunteering to get my aura photographed by the Detroit-based photography project, Aura Aura, when they were in town last month.

According to the artist/projector behind Aura Aura, Eileen Lee, the colors of one’s aura reflect the shifting energies within a person and can change depending on our unique life trajectories, experiences, and state of mind. The aura colors are based on the electromagnetic field around the human body (though “pet aura” photography services are now listed on the site) and can be both measured and, apparently, photographed.

Aura Aura’s website is rather pretty. The front page features rows of colorful, neatly aligned aura portraits, a few paragraphs on the “research-based practice that serves as a vessel for exploring the #humanatmosphere,” leading somewhat predictably to an all caps quote by Deepak Chopra, a man my parents generally view as a master grifter, though this may be partly due to some degree of jealousy that he cashed in on the New Age hustle early, making millions on the Western fever for alternative medicine. With fewer scruples, it could have been our family leading the #humanatmosphere revolution all the way to the bank, damn it.

But I digress. Pseudoscientific buzzwords aside, mostly I was intrigued by how a pop-up photo studio, charging $65 (twenty bucks more if you wanted to add a friend) for what appeared to be a polaroid with an instagram filter, could sell out bookings in five minute intervals for multiple cities. What was the game? What were these photos actually capturing? The people needed answers.

I managed to secure one of the last available Aura Aura photo sessions, to be held in that most mystical of places: the lobby of a hotel…inside a mall…in North Bethesda. Along for the ride is my friend and skeptic Roxanne, because she has a car and seemed game for an afternoon of light witchery.

When we arrived, it only took a second to spot the white geodesic photo dome from the website in one corner of the lobby waiting area, which was the only indication some kind of aura business was going down. A friendly looking person, who I recognized as Eileen, chief aura photographer in charge, was standing next to a kiosk off to the side.

I chatted with a couple of people who were waiting for their friend, who was apparently a veteran of aura readings, to finish up. Before I could grill them for information, I was ushered into the darkened dome for my photo. Time for my closeup. I was told to sit on the stool and rest my hands on curious-looking metal plates that I balanced on my lap. Easy enough. After a few seconds staring into a camera with what I hoped was a normal expression, a flash went off. I exited the dome to a little kiosk where Eileen had put my soul polaroid into a stylish box, which I assumed functioned as a mini dark room, for processing.

Eileen pauses for a breath after lifting out my aura photo. “Wow. Your energy is very…dense.” Where I come from those are fighting words. Kidding! I had no idea what that meant.

I peeked over to take in my aura photo which I thought, at first glance, lacked a certain sophistication. My face is barely visible behind the plumes of yellow and orange. The neutral expression I thought I was sporting had actually been a goofy smile. I had also unfortunately chosen to wear a bright yellow blouse that day, so if there was a discernible vibe, it was…spontaneous human combustion?

Wasting no time, Eileen handed me a laminated card with the color descriptions and some kind of humanoid diagram on the back, and dove into the reading. First, the “dense energy” comment: concentrations of color near the head area are supposed to indicate my aspirations.

“Are you thinking about any big decisions right now?” she asked.

“I guess so?” I replied, shrugging in what I hoped was a carefree way. I didn’t want to say anything that might sway the reading, but if my auric state indicated that I was constantly overthinking shit, she really nailed it.

Eileen paused to ask if I knew anything about chakras. Uh oh. Unbidden, my mind started flooding with nonsense quotes from some old interview with Deepak Chopra I had skimmed that morning in preparation. Mercifully, she moved on.

I was told that the warm yellow tones suggested I was open and playful, and the explosion of orange and reddish tones meant I was adventurous and creative. I frantically take notes as she talks, messily jotting down phrases to decipher later; “active root chakra”, “tan undertones = logical,” “new life chapter?”

Glancing down at my photo again, it was hard to see any of this in the bright yellow fog engulfing my face and the photograph like a symbiote. The little laminated card that accompanies each photo lists off some general descriptors for each aura color and, well, some are definitely sexier than others. Here’s how they describe people with violet-hued auras: magical, visionary, inspiring, humanitarian.

By comparison, my dominant yellow aura, seemed disappointingly one-note: optimistic, intelligent, playful, open-minded. The description was not inaccurate, per se, but it was maddeningly general and all positive, which seemed suspect. Where were the descriptors for someone with really dank vibes? What color would Rasputin’s aura have been?

Eileen and the Aura website both affirm that there were no bad colors (only bad …people?) but the hue of a color may suggest a lower vibration energy. One website noted ominously: “Dark or murky shades of yellow can reflect sarcasm, self-criticism, self-limiting perfectionism, stifled creativity, depression, or antisocial behavior.” Finally, the gritty realism I was seeking!

I wait for a break in Eileen’s explanations of each color’s significance to ask some of my more pressing follow up questions, but faster than you can say, “Wait, what tan undertones?” my time was up. I had chosen what I had thought was the last slot of the day thinking it might allow time afterwards to debrief, but she politely shot that idea down. She slipped my photo back in its box, signaling the end of our session. About five minutes had elapsed.

When I showed Roxanne my aura photo, still nestled in its glam protective box, she didn’t look impressed.

“You can’t even see your face!”

She also clocked my post-reading vibes as a “downer,” but maybe my chakras were just aggravated by all the unanswered questions. I still knew nothing! How were moods or energies expressed through colors? What exactly was that machine back in the tent picking up?

Back in the car, while I’m googling biometric hand readers like a normal person, resident financial analyst Roxanne was trying to get to the bottom of how much money this aura racket was producing. “So if you round up to an average of $80 a session for like five hours; at five minutes each, with two breaks…she’s clocking maybe 10 hours over two days? That’s like 8 grand. Of course, then you have to factor in self-employment taxes…”

While she’s crunching the numbers, my internet search hits pay dirt immediately: as it happens, several places have already covered the aura photography process at length.

The basic science behind the photos is pretty simple: a biofeedback apparatus (like the metal plates I touched back in the Aura Aura dome) measures the electrical potential of the subject’s palm and fingers, along the meridian points; this information is then translated to an electrical frequency which shows up as different colors. The final photo is a sum of two exposures:

“The first exposure captures the person’s likeness, while the second superimposes the generated hues. The polychromatic haze, which differs from photograph to photograph, is purported to represent the subject’s aura and provide insight into his or her chakric energies.“

It’s worth noting that a number of factors can impact the aura photograph: the biometric feedback picks up everything from skin density and moisture, to the varying amounts of pressure the subject applies to the hand sensors. I scrutinized my photo again in light of the new information: I had walked in the rain, so it was possible there was moisture on my skin, and though I tried to relax before my photo was taken, gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking about as I stared into the camera for that brief flash.

In 1939, when a Russian couple, the Kirlians, first stumbled upon a way to capture the human energy field on film, spiritualism was already having a hell of a moment.

“So culturally prevalent was Spiritualism at the time that even skeptics and dabblers felt compelled to explore it. Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Queen Victoria all attended séances, and although plenty of people declined to attend so much as a single table-turning, the movement was hard to avoid; in the span of four decades, according to one estimate, a new book about Spiritualism was published roughly once a week.”

Although the Victorian spirit enthusiasts and effluvist photographers of yore were serious types, they also knew a thing or two about showmanship.

“…the allure of Spiritualism was not limited to consolation for the bereft: plenty of mediums worked as much in the tradition of the carnival barker as in that of the cleric, and Spiritualism was popular in part because it was entertaining. Its practitioners, some of them true connoisseurs of spectacle, promised not only reassurances about the well-being of the dearly departed but also new lines from Shakespeare and fresh wisdom from Plato.”

Aura Aura had none of the spectacle of these high-brow salons in their DMV pop-up because, well, there’s just no ambience to be had in the sterile hotel lobby of a North Bethesda mall. Also, Eileen Lee doesn’t claim to be a medium or a psychoanalyst. In a write up of an aura photo session at her Detroit-based studio, she says “I’m not a psychic. I’m not a healer. That’s not what I bring to this project. For me, it is more of a study of art logic. It’s about awareness and self-exploration.”

Maybe that was the problem. Once I dragged a friend to a cheapo tarot reader for fun, and admittedly, it took a little something away from the ambience when the reader reluctantly shut off the television to half-heartedly shuffle out a bunch of cards, in between screaming at her dog to stay behind the partition. By the end, all three of us seemed depressed by the experience. Maybe I was disappointed by my aura photography session because I viewed it less as an opportunity to plumb the depths of my (oddly monochromatic) soul, and more like a haunted house, expecting a strange and theatrical experience on the other side.

When I checked out the Yelp reviews for Aura Aura’s studio in Detroit, not one accused the studio of fakery. Instead I found mostly positive comments, including many from repeat customers who enthusiastically reported back on the accuracy of Eileen’s auric insights. The real appeal of aura photography seemed to be about being able to read people in ways that made them feel understood. I could see how that kind of affirmation could be therapeutic; especially since the colors in an aura photo are linked, however tenuously, to real biofeedback information.

Even Josh Reynolds, the mood ring guy (also responsible for America’s Thigh Master craze decades later), is a true believer. After the ring fad passed, Reynolds ran a stress clinic using biofeedback to help people become more aware of their emotional states and manage them more effectively. When interviewed recently, he also predicted the resurgence of more high-tech forms of mood science. “Even today, there’s not a widespread understanding of how it works, but it’s more than a fad.”

Though I didn’t pay for the reading out of pocket, and can’t bring myself to recommend what I’d describe as a very well-packaged, drive-by photography session, I can’t entirely dismiss it. As a snapshot of one’s emotional temperature, I was pretty unmoved by my photo. But viewed as a social activity, chatting about aura fluctuations with a friend seems to me in the same vein as dissecting the results of a personality test.

We can quibble over how much money that’s worth, but for many, I suspect aura photography is just a harmless, if overpriced, way to pass an afternoon in lieu of more traditional avenues for self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment. This seems to track broadly with how Americans, but especially Millennials, tend to view spiritualism these days: “…no longer persuaded by orthodox religious accounts but also not satisfied with pure materialism, they experiment with psychics, crystals, tarot, and astrological charts, or simply swap stories of the eerie and the unexplained.”

When compared across the continuum of other New Age fads we’ve seen, aura photography seems far less morally fraught than, say, healing crystals mined using slave labor, psychics preying on the elderly, or whatever terrifying new product Goop and their ilk are peddling these days. Aura Aura isn’t trying to dispense spiritual advice, so much as read the room — no big science experiment, just vibes.