My love for the red-glasses-bearing comic book characters Daredevil and Cyclops led me to make a very interesting purchase. I ended up buying a pair of red chromotherapy (also known as color therapy) glasses.
What is color therapy?
According to a 2005 study on color therapy done by the National Center for Biotech Information, chromotherapy is a method of treatment that uses the visible spectrum (colors) of electromagnetic radiation to cure diseases.
The study also states that this practice is a centuries-old concept that has been used successfully over the years to cure various diseases.
Also, according to this study, each color affects a certain set of organs. Red is supposed to affect the kidney, bladder, and hips.
I am skeptical about this experiment and if it will help me at all, especially because the Wikipedia page for chromotherapy has related pages such as, “List of ineffective cancer treatments” and “List of topics characterized as pseudoscience.”
The experience
I only wore the glasses on weeknights at around 9 or 10 p.m. for about 20 minutes. I found myself feeling tired before and after wearing the glasses.
I also found it very hard to do homework on a computer because the colors on the screen mixed together. It’s no easy task to do homework when you can’t see the dashed red line underneath misspelled words.
On top of all this, by the time I wore the glasses my eyes were already tired from looking at a computer screen, and the glasses only intensified this effect.
Contrary to this discovery, I found it easier to read and complete worksheets.
My eyes tend to wander when I work on an assignment for a long time, but with the glasses the paper that I was looking at seemed much brighter and helped me focus a lot more.
On one of the nights, I decided to not do homework and instead look at comic book art.
The art that was once beautiful to me looked like a seven year old’s coloring book. The colors were all indistinguishable and the faces lost their sense of detail.
Besides the physical downfalls, I didn’t experience any mood changes or changes in my behavior. I still felt the same as always, both before and after wearing the glasses.
What I learned
Almost nothing changed. Sure, the glasses are nerdily awesome in that they make me feel like a comic book character, but the actual effects the glasses and the studies surrounding them promised, never actually came. I didn’t notice any mood changes or health benefits and the glasses brought me more negative side-effects then positive ones.
The only thing these glasses changed for me was my ability to focus on physical sheets of paper.
If you want to try something that is spiritual or whatever, try meditating.