Guide · the technology explained
Where the colors in an aura photo actually come from, how Kirlian photography and the modern aura camera differ, how to read a finished print, and what a studio session really costs — explained plainly, without the mystique.
The short answer
An aura camera does not photograph light coming off your body. It takes an ordinary portrait, measures small electrical signals from your hands on a sensor plate, and uses software to turn those measurements into colored light that is exposed onto the same frame. Kirlian photography is a different technique entirely: no portrait, no lens, just the glow of ionised air around an object sitting on the film. Both produce genuinely striking images. Neither has been shown to record an energy field.
The basics
Aura photography is the practice of producing an image in which bands of colored light surround a person, presented as a portrait of their energy field. The result is instantly recognisable: a face in the middle, a wash of magenta, gold or turquoise blooming outward, and a reader explaining what each color says about you.
The phrase covers two quite different technologies that are often confused with each other. One is Kirlian photography, a corona-discharge technique from the 1930s that images the edge of an object in a strong electrical field. The other is the portrait aura camera, a biofeedback device from the 1970s that is what almost every shop, festival stall and wellness fair uses today. Knowing which one you are looking at explains most of what is confusing about the field.
Neither device sees anything a normal camera cannot. What both do is convert a physical measurement into a visual — and that visual then becomes the starting point for a reading. The interesting part of aura photography is not the optics; it is what people do with the picture afterwards.
A high-voltage, high-frequency electrical field is applied to a plate while an object — usually a fingertip or a leaf — rests directly on the film. The field ionises the air at the object's edge, and that corona discharge exposes the film as a glowing outline. There is no lens and no portrait: you get a fingertip halo, not a picture of a person.
The machine used in almost every aura photo studio today. You rest your hands on metal sensor plates while a camera takes an ordinary portrait. The plates read electrical measurements from your skin, software converts those readings into colors, and the colors are exposed onto the same frame as a second layer of light around your body.
Inside the machine
Four measurements, one lookup table, and a second exposure onto the same frame.
Sit down in front of an aura camera and the first thing you are asked to do is put your hands on two metal plates shaped to fit your palm and fingers. Those plates are the actual instrument. The camera itself is ordinary — in the classic setup it is an instant film camera, and in newer installations a digital sensor with a printer attached.
While the shutter captures your portrait, the plates take a set of readings from your skin. Software turns those numbers into a palette, and the machine exposes that palette onto the frame as a soft, layered glow positioned around your head and shoulders. You get one print in which two separate things — a photograph and a data visualisation — have been combined into a single image.
Electrodes measure how easily a tiny current passes between two points on your hand. Conductance rises with sweat-gland activity, which shifts with arousal, stress and relaxation — the same signal used in classic biofeedback equipment.
Many models add a thermistor. Surface temperature at the hands changes with blood flow, which is why cold hands and warm hands can produce noticeably different readings on the same day.
Some cameras also sample pulse rate or contact pressure, giving the software more variables to work with before it picks the palette for your frame.
This is the step people rarely hear about. The readings are matched to colors by a mapping the manufacturer wrote into the software. The colors in your photo are an interpretation of measurements — they are not light that the camera detected coming off your body.
This is worth stating clearly, because studios rarely do: the colors are produced by the software, from hand measurements, according to rules a manufacturer chose. That does not make the picture worthless — it makes it a snapshot of your physical state at one moment, rendered in color. It does mean that two cameras from different makers can hand you two different auras on the same afternoon.
Where it came from
Semyon Kirlian was an electrical technician who repaired hospital equipment. In 1939, working with his wife Valentina, he began developing a technique for photographing objects in a high-frequency electrical field. Place a leaf, a coin or a fingertip on a photographic plate, run a strong field through it, and the air at the object's edge ionises and glows. The film records that glow as a spiky, luminous outline.
Corona discharge itself was not new — similar electrical images had been produced since the eighteenth century — but the Kirlians spent decades refining the method and photographing living tissue with it. Their work reached a mass Western audience in the 1970s, and the glowing fingertip became the defining image of the idea that a life force could be photographed.
Kirlian photography had an obvious limitation for anyone who wanted a reading: you cannot put a person on a photographic plate. During the 1970s, the American inventor Guy Coggins took a different route. Instead of imaging the body directly, he combined a normal portrait camera with biofeedback hand sensors and let software decide which colors to add.
That design is the ancestor of every portrait aura photo you have seen. Coggins went through several generations of the device, and his best-known model, the AuraCam 6000, became the standard machine in aura photo booths — recognisable by its instant prints and the smooth, saturated bands of color around the subject. Competing systems now exist, most of them working on the same principle with digital output.
Aura photography now lives mostly in metaphysical shops, wellness studios, music festivals, spas and pop-up events, where a print and a short interpretation are sold together as an experience. The photographs circulate widely on social media, which is why the aesthetic — the magenta-and-teal halo — is far more familiar than the technology behind it.
Reading the print
Two things carry meaning in a reading: which colors appear, and where they sit.
Start with the dominant color — the one that takes up the most space or reads brightest. That is treated as the headline of your current state. Then look for a secondary color, which readers interpret as an influence running underneath: a steady blue with a flare of red is read very differently from a steady red with a wash of blue.
Clarity matters as much as hue. Clean, saturated color is read as energy moving freely; muddy, grey or heavily mixed patches are read as tiredness, stress or something unresolved. Nobody in this tradition treats a dark patch as a verdict — it is read as a place to rest and pay attention.
Read as what you are focused on right now — the dominant thought, mood or intention you are putting out most strongly today. This is usually the color a reader comments on first.
Read as incoming energy: what is arriving, forming or about to matter. A bright, clean color here is treated as a sign that something is opening up.
Read as outgoing energy: what you are expressing and how other people experience you. Conventions differ between practitioners on which side is which, so ask the reader which system they use.
The band nearest your outline is treated as the most personal and physical layer — your immediate state, energy level and comfort in your own skin.
The farther a color extends, the broader the meaning assigned to it: outlook, values, the direction you are heading rather than how today is going.
One honest caveat: there is no single authoritative key. Different manufacturers assign colors differently, and different readers use different position systems. If two people give you two readings of the same print, that is the tradition working as it always has — interpretively.
Color index
The colors an aura photo most often produces, and how they are read. Open any color for the full guide.
Drive, vitality and physical presence. Read as someone grounded, energetic and ready to act.
Creativity, appetite for life and easy sociability. Often read as a phase of adventure or reinvention.
Optimism, curiosity and a quick mind. Frequently appears around people deep in learning or creative work.
Wisdom and inner alignment. Treated as a rare, high-integrity signature in most reading traditions.
Growth, healing and balance. Associated with nurturing people and periods of steady repair.
Abundance and a strong, generous heart. Read as natural healers and openhearted givers.
Calm, honesty and clear expression. Often read around people who communicate for a living.
Depth, sensitivity and strong intuition. Associated with empaths and quiet observers.
Vision, imagination and spiritual curiosity. Read as a seeker with an unusual inner world.
Transformation and depth. Treated as a marker of meaningful personal change in progress.
Love, tenderness and compassion. Read as a soft, affectionate and trusting energy.
Clarity and openness. Often read as a clean slate or a protective, uncluttered field.
What it costs
Prices depend heavily on the venue and the city, and the same machine can sit behind two very different price tags. As a general guide, a single instant aura photo at a metaphysical shop, festival stall or wellness fair typically costs somewhere around $25 to $45. That usually buys the print and a few minutes of conversation about the dominant color.
A full session — a photo plus a printed multi-page report generated by the software, plus a sit-down interpretation with a reader — generally runs $60 to $150, and longer or couples sessions can go above that. Where aura photography is bundled into a spa or wellness package, it is often priced as an add-on rather than sold on its own.
Two things are worth checking before you book, because they are the most common source of disappointment. First, whether the price includes an interpretation or only the print. Second, whether you get a digital copy — some setups still hand you a single instant photo and nothing else, which is a problem if you wanted to share it.
| Studio aura photo | Online aura scan | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Hand-sensor readings, on the day | Colors and tones in a photo of you |
| You get | An instant print, sometimes a report | An on-screen reading you keep |
| Typical price | $25–$150 depending on the session | Free to see your colors |
| Time | Book ahead, travel, queue | About two minutes |
| Where | At the venue only | Anywhere, any time |
| Repeatable | Pay again each visit | Rescan whenever you like |
Looking for somewhere local rather than the technology behind it? See where to get an aura reading near you.
Straight answer
The equipment is real and the effects it records are real. Corona discharge is ordinary electrical physics, reproducible in any lab with a high-voltage source. Skin conductance is a genuine physiological measurement, used in clinical biofeedback for decades. Nothing about an aura photo is faked in the sense of a trick.
What has not been established is the interpretation. There is no peer-reviewed evidence that these images capture an energy field around the body, or that a particular color reliably corresponds to a personality trait, an emotion or a life direction. Corona images in particular respond strongly to moisture on the skin, contact pressure and voltage, which accounts for much of the variation people read as meaning. We are not going to tell you otherwise.
That leaves aura photography roughly where a tarot spread or a journalling prompt sits: a structured, visual way to stop and ask how you are actually doing. Plenty of people find that genuinely useful, and find that the reading lands. Take it as reflection and self-inquiry rather than diagnosis, and it is a good experience. Read it as a medical or scientific result and it is not.
The online route
A hand-sensor reading cannot travel down a wire, so an online scan is not the same machine and we will not pretend it is. What it can do is take the part people actually come for — your aura colors and a reading that makes sense of them — and deliver it in two minutes, from a photo you already have, for nothing.
Our scanner analyses the colors, light and tones in your portrait, maps them across your aura layers, and writes a personal reading from them: your dominant color, the influences running underneath it, and what the combination suggests about where you are right now. No booking, no travel, no print to lose. If you later sit down in front of a real aura camera, you will already know how to read what comes out of it.
Skip the appointment. Add a photo, answer a few quick questions, and get your aura colors and what they mean in about two minutes.
Start my free aura scanAlready have the picture you want to use? Go straight to the aura reading from a photo.
Questions
Aura photography is the practice of producing a portrait with colored light layered around the subject, presented as a picture of their energy field. In practice it means one of two technologies: Kirlian photography, which records the corona discharge around an object in a high-voltage field, or a biofeedback aura camera, which measures electrical readings from your hands and translates them into colors that are exposed onto your portrait.
You place your hands on metal sensor plates while the camera takes an ordinary portrait. The plates measure skin conductance, and often temperature and pulse. The camera's software converts those measurements into colors using a mapping built by the manufacturer, then exposes those colors onto the same frame as a second layer of light. The colors are a translation of biofeedback readings, not light captured coming off your body.
Kirlian photography is named after Semyon Kirlian, a Soviet electrical technician who, with his wife Valentina, began refining the technique in Krasnodar in 1939. Corona-discharge imaging had been demonstrated decades earlier, but the Kirlians popularised it, and it reached Western readers in the 1970s. The portrait-style aura camera came later: Guy Coggins started building aura cameras in the 1970s, and his best-known machine, the AuraCam 6000, is still the model many studios use.
No. The physical effects involved are real and well documented — corona discharge is standard electrical physics, and skin conductance is a genuine biofeedback measurement. What is not scientifically established is the interpretation: there is no peer-reviewed evidence that these images capture an energy field, or that a given color reliably corresponds to a personality or emotional state. Corona images in particular are strongly affected by moisture, pressure and voltage. Treat an aura photo as a reflective tool, not a measurement of who you are.
Prices vary by city and venue. A single instant aura photo at a metaphysical shop, festival or wellness fair commonly runs about $25 to $45. A full session — a photo plus a printed multi-page report and a sit-down interpretation with a reader — is usually in the $60 to $150 range. Always check what is included before you book, because some prices cover the print only.
Readers interpret both the color and where it sits. Warm colors like red, orange and yellow are read as active, outward and energised; cooler colors like blue, indigo and violet are read as reflective, intuitive and inward. The color above your head is treated as your current focus, one side as incoming energy, the other as what you are expressing. Muddy or dark patches are usually read as tiredness or stalled energy rather than as something bad.
Because the inputs change. Biofeedback cameras respond to your physical state at that moment, so hydration, room temperature, how warm your hands are, how hard you press on the plates, caffeine and stress can all move the reading. Practitioners frame this as your aura shifting day to day; technically, it reflects how sensitive the measurement is to conditions.
You cannot reproduce a hand-sensor reading through a screen, so an online scan is not the same machine. What an online scan does is analyse the colors and tones in a photo you already have and build a reading from them, instantly and free. It gives you the part most people actually want from a studio visit — your aura colors and what they mean — without booking or travelling.
You do not need a camera, a booking or a studio to find out which colors are yours right now. The online scan takes about two minutes and is free to try.
See my aura colorsFree preview · no sign-up required
