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The following chart will help you in analysing your colour sensitivity and will also help in improving on your personality type:
Red: Red is a powerful colour that has always been associated with vitality and ambition. It can help overcome negative thoughts. However, it is also associated with anger; if we have too much red in our system, or around us, we may feel irritable, impatient, and uncomfortable.
Pink: Pink is emotionally soothing and calming, and gives a feeling of gentle warmth and nurturing. It lessons feelings of irritation and aggression, surrounding us with a sense of love and protection. It also alleviates loneliness, despondency, over sensitivity, and vulnerability. While red relates to sexuality, pink is associated with unselfish love.
Orange: Orange is a joyous colour. It frees and releases emotions and alleviates feelings of self-pity, lack of self worth, and unwillingness to forgive. It stimulates the mind, renewing interest in life; it is a wonderful anti-depressant and lifts the spirits. Apricot and Peach is good for nervous exhaustion.
Green: Green has a strong affinity with nature, helping us connect with empathy to others and the natural world. We instinctively seek it out when under stress or experiencing emotional trauma. It creates a feeling of comfort, laziness and relaxation, calmness, and space, lessening stress, balancing and soothing the emotions. Dark green represents the onset of death and is non-descript, unassertive, a negation of love and joy.
Lime green and olive green can have a detrimental effect on both physical and emotional health since sickly yellow and green are associated with the emotions of envy, resentment, and possessiveness.
Yellow: Yellow is also a happy, bright, and uplifting colour, a celebration of sunny days. It is associated with the intellectual side of the mind, and the expression of thoughts. It therefore aids the powers of discernment and discrimination, memory and clear thinking, decision- making and good judgment.
It also helps good organisation, assimilation of new ideas, and the ability to see different points of view. It builds self-confidence and encourages an optimistic attitude. Conversely, dull yellow can be the colour of fear.
Turquoise: We associate blue greens with the refreshing and cool ocean. It is therefore invigorating, cooling, and calming. Like green, turquoise is good for mental strain and tiredness or feeling washed out. It is an elevating colour that encourages us to make a sparkling fresh start.
Turquoise is also helpful for feelings of loneliness, since it heightens communication, sensitivity, and creativity.
 Colour therapy is the use of colour in a variety of ways to promote health and healing. The different colours we see in the world around us are the result of the eye perceiving light vibrating at different frequencies.
Sunlight, or full-spectrum light, holds all the wavelengths of colour in the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and magenta) as well as infrared and ultraviolet light, which cannot be seen.
Used to treat both physical and emotional problems, colour therapy may involve exposure to coloured lights, massages using colour-saturated oils, contemplating and visualizing colours, even wearing coloured clothing and eating coloured foods.
Not surprisingly, colour has played a role in healing for centuries. At the temple of Heliopolis in ancient Egypt, patients were treated in rooms specifically designed to break up the sun's rays into the colours of the spectrum. People also made regular pilgrimages to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the world, to take advantage of the healing colours of the exotic plants and flowers found there.
In India, practitioners of Ayurveda (now the oldest health-care system in the world), taught that specific colours corresponded with each of the seven chakras, the energy centers that represent organs, emotions, and aspects of the spirit. (Today Ayurvedic medicine continues to use colour to treat a wide range of mental and physical imbalances.)
It wasn't until the late 17th century, however, that modern-day colour theory was born, when English philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton conducted his prism experiments and showed that light is truly a mixture of colours from the visible spectrum.
Although doctors used colour to treat everything from psychological problems to smallpox over the next hundred years, interest in colour's effects on healing didn't really pick up until 1878, when Dr. Edwin D. Babbitt published his book Principles of Light and Colour. Here he described his work in chromato- therapy (healing with coloured lights), suggesting it as a treatment for a variety of ailments, including burns, nervous excitability, and cold in the extremities.
Probably the most extensive and detailed work on coloured light therapy, however, was done by Dr. Dinshah P. Ghadiali (1873-1966), a naturalized American from India, who had studied Babbitt's work. The doctor spent many years researching the effects of colour on disease and developing coloured filters.
In 1920, he introduced a system of coloured lights, which he sold under the name "Spectro-Chrome" lamps.
Touted as a treatment for such diseases as diabetes, tuberculosis, and chronic gonorrhea, the healing lamps were considered preposterous by many M.D.s and miraculous by others who claimed success with them.
Although controversial (Dinshah spent much time in court defending his product), his work continues to inspire many colour therapists today.
In 1947, Swiss psychologist Dr. Max Lüscher introduced the Lüscher Colour Test, a form of colour therapy still widely used by many psychologists. The test consists of choosing 43 colours from a total of 73 possibilities, although there are simpler variations.
By observing the colours a person chooses or rejects, the therapist can learn a good deal about a subject's psychological state. For example, if a person selects darker colors, it suggests a need for rest and stress reduction.
At about the same time, Russian researcher S.V. Krakov was conducting a series of experiments in which he separated the different wavelengths in the light spectrum to show how colour can affect the nervous system.
He observed that red light stimulated the adrenal glands, raising blood pressure and pulse rate, and that blue and white light had a calming effect. Although there are still no rigorous studies supporting Krakov's work, many practitioners today commonly recommend colour therapy for stress and for stress-related pain.
In recent years interest in colour therapy has grown as studies have shown the positive effects of full-spectrum light on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and other forms of depression. Mainstream researchers are looking into its use for a variety of other ailments as well, from sleep disorders to hormonal problems.
More unusual colour therapies also continue to be utilized. Over the past decade Aura-Soma (an Eastern-influenced therapy that uses coloured bottles of essential oils and extracts to shed light on a person's "true inner self") has gained a following. And Esogetic Colourpunc- ture Therapy (ECT), which focuses coloured light on acupuncture points, is being studied as a treatment for a variety of health problems, including migraines, bronchitis, and uterine fibroids.
 Swati Kapoor
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