Getting These Blues Can Help

Color Therapy To Improve Well-Being

(CBS)  Estheticians swear that each color has its own energy and healing power. So now when you hit the spa for a little pampering you can choose from a rainbow of treatments, The Early Show's Laurie Hibberd reports for the Good Life series. The following is her report.

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Who knew it felt so good to be blue? For years people have used color to affect their mood, but now, we are learning that color may actually change the way we feel physically.

Lysa Kustek of Le Petit Retreat Day Spa says, "It is something that is really not tangible, but people really feel it whenever they're in an environment."

What they're feeling are the color's vibrations that supposedly stimulate moods and reactions. Coupled with massage, the use of five different colors of light pulsed into the body can help with any number of ailments. Blue and purple lights are used as an anti-inflammatory.

"The green light would actually help cleanse and purify the person inside," Kustek notes, "If you were to have like fibromyalgia, we would use the yellow light that stimulates the lymphatic system.

The red light is very stimulating so if somebody is already agitated or nervous you don't want to put the red light on them because it would kind of agitate them and make them more nervous."

But there are skeptics. After all, if its just taken at its face value, it sounds really far fetched.

"There are people who don't believe in it," Kustek says, "You know, they want something more tangible. But we've been doing it for four years, and I know other spas have been dong it a lot longer. And we tell people up front that the body is very responsive. Even if the mind doesn't believe it, the body knows what it needs."

At the Ona Spa in Los Angeles, they don't just use light beams. They actually immerse their facial clients in a red, blue or green themed environment.

Brigitte Beasse of the Ona Spa says, "When your mind is in like a green environment, it just makes everything good inside. Just the idea of the green has really an impact into the mind. And it starts a whole process of healing internally."

The concept of color therapy dates back to ancient Egypt. These days, it is embraced whole-heartedly by the holistic set, and even the scientific community is looking into its merits.

"There is validity to it actually," says Dr. George Kessler. He practices light therapy in his Manhattan office and has also seen doctors at Cornell Medical Center looking into the possibility of using green light to treat lung cancer.

Dr. Kessler says, "They discovered it as they were using an endoscope to look down into the lungs - a bronchoscope. They used different colored light filters on the light and they showed that it had different effects on the various cells."

Whether scientists ultimately give color therapy a green light or not, it is still difficult to actually feel the immediate effects, or is it?

"It's detoxing your body," Kustek of Le Petit says, "Right away your body's going to start flushing out the toxins."

Just to note the use of green light to treat lung cancer is still in the research stages, but Dr. Kessler does say we are just scratching the surface of color therapy's potential.