Colors affect moods and emotions. Color therapy uses this sensitivity to color to identify and correct any imbalances in the body's internal energy patterns that might lead to emotional or physical ill health. Therapists believe that each organ and body system has its own characteristic vibrational energy, and disorders can be healed by applying color of the corresponding vibrational energy, either to the whole body or to the organ concerned.

For example, the red spectrum affects our physical energies. It is stimulating and warming. Blues are cooling and cleansing, affecting our spiritual energies. The yellow shades serve to bridge them, affecting our mental energies. The three colors together provide opportunities for healing our body, mind, and spirit.

Chromotherapy, sometimes called colour therapy or colourology, is an alternative medicine method. It is claimed that a therapist trained in chromotherapy can use colour and light to balance energy wherever our bodies are lacking, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental.

Chromotherapists claim a scientific basis for their practice, proposing that colours bring about emotional reactions in people. A standard method of diagnosis is the use of Luscher’s colour test, developed by Dr. Max Luscher in the early 1900s. When performing chromotherapy, colour and light is applied to specific areas and acupoints on the body. Because colours get associated with both positive and negative effects in colour therapy, specific colours and accurate amounts of colour are deemed to be critical in healing. Some of the tools used for applying colours are gemstones, candles, wands, prisms, coloured fabrics, bath treatments, and coloured glasses or lenses. Therapeutic colour can be administered in a number of ways, but is often combined with hydrotherapy and aromatherapy in an attempt to heighten the therapeutic effect.

Several findings indicate that colour and light have been used for health treatments since the beginning of recorded time. Colour therapy is possibly rooted in Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine practiced in India for thousands of years. Other historic roots are attributed to Chinese and ancient Egyptian culture. In traditional Chinese medicine, each organ is associated with a colour. Ancient Egyptians built solarium-type rooms, which could be fitted with coloured panes of glass. The sun would shine through the glass and flood the patient with colour. As late as the nineteenth century, European smallpox victims and their sickrooms were draped with red cloth to draw the disease away from the body.

Today, some therapists have a box with a mechanism that flickers light into the eyes. They report success in speeding the recovery of stroke victims and those persons who experience chronic depression. Some therapists recommend the wearing of eyeglasses with coloured lenses. Specialized shops also sell baths equipped with lamps that emit the wanted colour to induce the desired effect. Chromotherapy is not bound to medicine: practitioners of Feng Shui bring specific colours into our homes and workplaces, trying to achieve optimum balance of energy.