The Glamour Shots of Wishful Thinking
Aura photography is the perfect scam: expensive, scientific-looking, and so devoid of actual science it might as well come bundled with a free tin-foil hat.
The idea is simple — and by simple, I mean insultingly stupid. You sit for a portrait while a “special” camera captures the invisible cloud of energy allegedly radiating from your body. The resulting image shows swirls of colored light, which a “trained intuitive” will happily interpret for you — for a price, of course.
“Your aura shows vibrant greens today,” they’ll say, stroking their chin like a dollar-store Freud. “You’re healing from past wounds.”
Or perhaps: “There’s too much red near your crown chakra. You’re stressed.”
Brilliant. I can get the same diagnosis by glancing at anyone stuck in a grocery store line behind a couponer.
The technology behind aura photography — if you can even call it that — is based on Kirlian photography, a real phenomenon discovered in the 1930s, where high-voltage currents produce coronal discharges captured on photographic plates. It’s fascinating from a physics standpoint. It has absolutely nothing to do with psychic fields, emotional states, or the balance of your inner cosmic fruit basket. It’s moisture, pressure, and electric fields — not proof that your soul is shooting rainbows out of your kneecaps.
But that doesn’t stop the “practitioners” from reading your colors like fortune cookies. Feeling blue? That’s sadness. Seeing yellow? Joy, obviously. More purple than usual? Congratulations, you’re “spiritually attuned.” Funny how no one ever seems to have a chartreuse aura and get diagnosed as “deeply mediocre.”
Aura photography persists because it flatters people. It tells them they’re special, complex, radiating invisible majesty that only the enlightened can detect. It transforms the deeply mundane — sweat, body heat, moisture in the skin — into a cosmic tapestry. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of putting a dog in a bowtie and congratulating it for graduating from Harvard.
Aura photography doesn’t reveal your inner self. It reveals your willingness to pay strangers to color-code your gullibility. You’re not glowing. You’re getting scammed.