Chromotherapy

Babbitt and the 1878 textbook

Edwin D. Babbitt's textbook Principles of Light and Color was issued in New York by Babbitt & Co., with an 1878 title page. That page lists chromo chemistry and chromo therapeutics among its subjects, and one chapter is headed Chromo-Therapeutics, or Chromopathy. The chapter calls sunlight a celestial materia medica and says red light warms and stimulates the blood, citing case reports by another physician, Dr. S. Pancoast, of recovery from paralysis and consumption under red light. These are nineteenth-century anecdotal accounts, not controlled studies.

A 2005 magazine essay by Christopher Turner describes Babbitt as an American teacher and mesmerist who held that sickness appears as a disruption of a person's color energy. The essay says he sold a sixteen-color stained-glass device called the Chromolume, and cheaper items such as a Chromo-Disk and a Chromo-Lens for charging water with color.

Earlier and parallel ideas

Turner's account in Tate Etc. places color therapy in a longer line of ideas. It notes Goethe's Theory of Colours of 1810, which linked colors with temperaments, and experiments in the 1880s by the French psychologist Charles Féré at the Salpêtrière hospital, who believed colored light acted on the nervous system. Turner also says Gauguin and Kandinsky drew on color theories, and that Max Lüscher's color-sorting test of 1949 revived interest in color psychology.

Ghadiali and the Spectro-Chrome

Dinshah P. Ghadiali, an Indian-born American, introduced the Spectro-Chrome in 1920: a metal housing with a 1,000-watt bulb and colored glass slides. He proposed that each chemical element corresponds to a color of light, and that disturbed body chemistry can be restored by the matching color. JSTOR Daily reports that at least 10,000 Americans completed Spectro-Chrome Institute training between 1920 and the 1960s, mostly working-class people and many of them women, who treated themselves, relatives and paying clients. Turner reports roughly 11,000 devices sold by 1946 at prices up to $750.

The sources disagree on some biographical details: JSTOR Daily gives Ghadiali's birth year as 1873 and his arrival in the United States as 1896, while Turner gives 1882 and 1911. A 1993 biographical article in the journal Caduceus is indexed in PubMed under subject headings that include quackery, and its abstract is not available, so the article's own conclusions were not verified here.

Steiner and anthroposophic color

A 2024 article in Approaching Religion by Sari Kuuva examines how Rudolf Steiner's thinking about color drew on theosophy and on Goethe's color philosophy, using his lectures and works such as the 1922 Nature Mood sketches and the 1924 painting New Life. The summary reviewed treats color mainly as an aesthetic and religious matter and does not describe a chromotherapy device practice. Claims that Steiner founded a color therapy therefore need a separate primary source.

Names in use

Babbitt used chromopathy and chromo-therapeutics in 1878. Modern papers use chromotherapy for quite different things: colored light shown to dental patients before treatment, sunlight filtered through blue glass, and a device that combines music, light and color sessions. Color is the US spelling and colour the British; both appear in the literature, and color therapy is used as a plain-language synonym.

Terms that are not the same practice

Clinical light therapy and phototherapy are dosed medical uses of light, such as bright white light for seasonal affective disorder or blue-range light for newborn jaundice, and are reviewed separately below. Color psychology is an experimental field that studies how seeing a color relates to emotion, motivation or behavior; for example, Jonauskaite and colleagues studied which emotion words people in 30 nations associate with color names. Neither field is chromotherapy, although chromotherapy texts sometimes borrow their findings.

Chakra-color correspondences

Kurt Leland, writing in Quest magazine in 2017, traces the familiar rainbow assignment of colors to the seven chakras to the twentieth century rather than to classical Indian sources. He credits color therapists such as Ivah Bergh Whitten and S. G. J. Ouseley in the 1920s to 1950s, and says Ken Dychtwald combined those color schemes with psychological qualities in his 1977 book Bodymind. Practitioners who pair colors with chakras are therefore following a modern Western system, and Leland describes the complete package as barely forty years old.

Historical delivery

Case reports quoted in Babbitt's book describe a child dressed in white and placed in strong red light for one to two hours at a time. Turner's account of the Spectro-Chrome says treatments, called tonations, were given in a darkened room, with the patient seated unclothed and facing north, at times chosen by astrological timetables. These are descriptions of historical practice and of one tradition's rules, not a standard protocol.

Formats in recent studies

Recent trials use short, simple exposures. In one randomized trial, 90 adults saw blue light, pink light or no color session before endodontic treatment. In another, hypertensive adults sat for 20 minutes in sunlight passing through blue or colorless glass. An open pilot gave chronic pain patients four weekly half-hour sessions on a device that combined music, light and color. Wavelengths, intensities and session length are reported differently in each, so no common dose exists.

Uses claimed historically

Babbitt's book quotes accounts attributing recovery from paralysis, advanced consumption and nervous exhaustion to red light. JSTOR Daily reports that Ghadiali held that orange stimulates breathing and thyroid function and that magenta supports emotional well-being. Turner says the Spectro-Chrome was promoted for ailments ranging from paralysis to blindness. None of these claims is supported by the controlled evidence reviewed in this article.

Uses studied or described now

Studies that use the label have targeted anxiety before dental treatment, blood pressure in hypertension and chronic pain with anxiety and depression symptoms. Practitioners who work with chakras describe pairing each of seven colors with a body region or quality, a scheme whose history is covered above. People also use colored lighting or imagery for mood and relaxation, a use the sources reviewed here describe only indirectly through color psychology.

Studies that use the term

A search of PubMed titles and abstracts on 2026-10-06 for chromotherapy or colour therapy returned 47 records. Among the first 20 screened by title, no systematic review of chromotherapy as a general practice was found; the relevant items were small trials. Saklecha and colleagues randomized 90 patients to blue, pink or no color session and reported lower anxiety scores in both color groups than in controls, with no difference between blue and pink. The abstract does not describe blinding or follow-up beyond the dental procedure.

Yoganathan and colleagues randomized 60 hypertensive adults to 20 minutes of sunlight through blue or colorless glass and reported lower systolic pressure and pulse rate in the blue-glass group immediately afterward; this tested an immediate effect only. Suarez and colleagues treated 44 chronic pain patients with a music, light and color device and reported improved pain and anxiety scores, but the pilot had no control group and the authors call for a controlled study. The device combines three components, so color cannot be isolated.

Clinical light therapy for mood

A 2025 systematic review and network meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials in 773 people with seasonal affective disorder compared white, blue, green and red light. It ranked white light highest, followed by green, blue and red, found usual care more effective than green light, and called for larger studies to compare wavelengths. A 2019 Cochrane review of light therapy to prevent seasonal depression found only one eligible trial of 46 people, with very low-quality evidence and wide confidence intervals. These findings concern a defined diagnosis and dosed clinical light, and they do not show that colored light helps mood in general.

Color psychology

Elliot and colleagues reported in 2007 that briefly seeing red before an achievement test lowered performance, a finding they linked to avoidance motivation. A 2012 experiment found the effect of red on walking speed depended on whether the setting was about dating or achievement. In a study of 4,598 participants in 30 nations, Jonauskaite and colleagues found highly similar color-emotion associations across nations, with local differences as well. These studies measure associations and short laboratory behavior, not treatment outcomes.

Neonatal jaundice phototherapy

Blue-range phototherapy is a hospital treatment for newborn hyperbilirubinemia. A Cochrane review of six randomized trials in 630 neonates found LED light sources comparable to halogen or compact fluorescent sources for treatment duration and bilirubin decline, with rare side effects. A 2022 American Academy of Pediatrics technical report found limited or inconsistent evidence of late adverse effects such as cancer and epilepsy. This is a dosed medical use with defined thresholds and monitoring, and its evidence should not be carried over to chromotherapy.

Eye and photosensitivity cautions

A 2023 narrative review reports that blue light causes photochemical reactions in the cornea, lens and retina, and that some exposures can cause temporary or permanent damage in laboratory studies, depending on wavelength and intensity. The same review found no evidence that screens and LEDs in normal use harm the human retina. It did not assess chromotherapy devices, so the relevance to particular products is not established.

A 2017 narrative review of photosensitivity and epilepsy states that about 5 percent of people with epilepsy have photosensitive epilepsy and that stimulation frequency, color and lighting all influence seizure risk. The review does not evaluate chromotherapy equipment, but it is the source here for caution around flickering or pulsed light. The sources reviewed do not address light sensitivity linked to medicines or other conditions.

Care boundaries and costs

The trials above did not test chromotherapy as a replacement for medical care. Historical claims that colored light could treat paralysis, tuberculosis-type illness or blindness show how substitution can arise, and using color sessions in place of assessment for hypertension, persistent pain or depression could delay needed care. Turner reports that Spectro-Chrome devices cost up to $750 each in the 1940s. The sources found no professional register, code of ethics or training standard for chromotherapy, and no statutory regulation was reviewed. This information is educational and is not individualized medical advice.