Chromotherapy: healing or hooey?

Chromotherapy is light therapy with colour. It uses the visible part of the light spectrum, and every colour in it has its own wavelength. Our infrared sauna has it built in, so you sit in coloured light while you heat up. There's a lot of misinformation about chromotherapy, so here's the plain version: what it is, where it comes from, and what it's like here.

What is chromotherapy?

Light is energy that travels in waves, and each colour you can see is a different wavelength. Chromotherapy is the practice of applying that visible, coloured light to the body.

You'll also hear it called light therapy, and that's where a lot of the confusion starts.

Isn't chromotherapy new-age stuff?

It's been used for centuries, and it's been studied with modern scientific methods since the 20th century. The trouble is the names.

"Chromotherapy" gets used interchangeably with "light therapy" and "colour therapy". Those aren't the same thing. Colour therapy is usually a design term, for how colour is used in spaces like hospitals and schools. Light therapy is light applied to the body.

Does light therapy have a real medical history?

It does. Blue light has been used to treat newborns with jaundice since the 1950s, and it's still used today. Doctors started using light therapy for seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in the 1980s.

That's light therapy in medicine. What we have in the sauna is something gentler: coloured light while you sit in the heat.

What's chromotherapy like in our sauna?

It's built into our infrared sauna cabin, so there's nothing extra to book and nothing to do. You sit in the coloured light for your session while the sauna warms you through. You can see the cabin on our equipment page.

If you want the studies behind the services here, and where each one stops, here's what the research actually says.

Generator is a recovery studio, not a medical provider. Nothing here diagnoses or treats a condition, and it isn't a substitute for advice from your own clinician.