Kirlian Photography: Can It Really Capture Your Aura?

This guide explains what Kirlian photography actually records, where the method came from, why the famous phantom leaf does not hold up, what a landmark 1976 paper in Science measured, and why the aura camera at the fair is a completely different machine. As always, we separate what is documented from what is tradition. Neither the photograph nor this article can tell you what your aura looks like, but both can tell you a lot about how easily a beautiful image turns into a belief.

What Kirlian photography is, in one paragraph

Kirlian photography is a process in which an object is placed on film or a photographic plate and exposed to high-frequency, high-voltage electricity. In the air around the object a corona discharge forms, the same faint glow you can see around high-voltage power lines on a foggy night or at the mast tip of a ship as St. Elmo's fire, and that discharge exposes the film. No camera and no lens are involved. The result is an image in which the outline of a leaf, a coin or a fingertip is surrounded by a halo of fine, branching filaments of light, often violet, blue or white. Physicists call the method corona discharge photography or electrography. Since the 1970s, the esoteric world has called it proof of the aura.

The history: not only Kirlian, but Lichtenberg, Navratil and Jodko

The Kirlians did not invent the glow. In 1777 the physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a professor in the German university town of Goettingen, sprinkled resin dust on an electrically charged plate and saw branching, tree-like patterns. Lichtenberg figures are still the name for the fern-shaped marks that high voltage leaves in insulating materials and, occasionally, on the skin of people struck by lightning. In 1889 the Czech researcher Bartolomej Navratil coined the word electrography. In 1896 the French physician Hippolyte Baraduc made electrographic images of hands and leaves and believed he saw a life force in them. And in 1898 the engineer Jakub Jodko-Narkiewicz exhibited hundreds of such images at the Russian Technical Society, fingertips with radiating crowns, some forty years before anything happened in Krasnodar.

Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was an electrician and amateur inventor in Krasnodar in southern Russia. According to the family account, in 1939 he was repairing a high-frequency electrotherapy device in a hospital and noticed a glow, like a neon tube, between the electrode and a patient's skin. He put film in between and photographed his own hand, then leaves, coins and fabrics. With his wife Valentina, a teacher and journalist, he refined the method for decades, filed patents and published in Soviet journals from the 1950s. The couple themselves were cautious about interpretation; they described differences between healthy and diseased leaves and hoped for a diagnostic use.

The West took notice only in 1970, when the American writers Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder published their bestseller Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. The book presented the images as Soviet evidence of an energy body, at the height of the Cold War and of American curiosity about Soviet parapsychology. From then on, the glow was called the Kirlian aura, and a whole generation of New Age books reproduced the pictures.

The phantom leaf: the most famous Kirlian image, and why it does not hold up

No single image shaped the legend like the phantom leaf. You cut off the tip of a leaf, place the rest on the film, and the photograph supposedly still shows the outline of the whole leaf, with the missing tip glowing like a ghost. For many readers this was proof of a subtle blueprint, an aura that outlasts the physical body. The effect is associated above all with the Soviet researcher Viktor Adamenko and with American experimenters of the 1970s.

The problem is that the effect could not be reliably reproduced under controlled conditions, and where it appeared, a mundane explanation turned up. The whole leaf had usually already lain on the same glass plate before it was cut, leaving a print of moisture and sap; the discharge simply traced that residue. When the plate was cleaned thoroughly between exposures, there was no phantom. Even Thelma Moss, who ran a parapsychology laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and studied Kirlian photography with real sympathy, reported that she obtained the phantom leaf in only a handful of attempts. The UCLA lab closed in 1979.

What the research measured: Science, 1976

The decisive paper appeared in October 1976 in the journal Science. A team led by John O. Pehek at New York University systematically tested which variables change a corona discharge image. The result was clear: most of the differences in length, density, curvature and color of the filaments could be explained by the moisture content of the object. Someone who is sweating produces a different corona than someone with dry skin; a fresh leaf glows differently from a wilted one because it holds more water. When moisture was controlled, for example with an insulating film or by drying, the differences largely disappeared. On top of that come pressure, voltage, frequency, exposure time, humidity, the film stock, and even how firmly someone presses a finger down. A later study by Arleen Watkins and William Bickel in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1986 reached the same conclusion with different equipment.

That also explains why Kirlian images of people really do seem to respond to emotions. When you are nervous, your fingertips sweat, and that changes the discharge. It is not an aura, but it is not fraud either; it is physiology writing itself onto the film by a detour. Skin conductance has been a known measure of arousal for more than a century, and polygraph machines rely on exactly this signal.

What changes a Kirlian image?

Variable	Effect on the image	Mistaken for an aura sign as
Moisture and sweat	longer, denser, more colorful streamers	mood, energy, health
Contact pressure	width and continuity of the halo	gaps or holes in the aura
Voltage and frequency	reach and brightness of the discharge	strong or weak radiance
Exposure time and film	color: violet, blue, white, reddish	aura colors
Residue on the plate	outlines of things that are no longer there	the phantom leaf

The aura camera at the fair: a completely different device

The colorful portrait you can have taken at a psychic fair or in some metaphysical shops is not Kirlian photography. It involves no high voltage and no corona discharge. The best-known design goes back to the California engineer Guy Coggins, who has built aura cameras since the 1980s. You rest your hands on two metal plates fitted with sensors, which mainly measure the electrical resistance of your skin; some devices also measure temperature. Software assigns colors to the readings according to a fixed chart and prints them as a cloud of color around an ordinary portrait photo, in the past on Polaroid film, today usually on a screen. Newer systems use biofeedback sensors on one hand and show the colors live as video.

In other words, the colors are not photographed; they are calculated. They reflect readings from your skin at one moment, translated through a color table that the manufacturer designed. A different maker, a different table, a different picture. That is not an accusation against the people who run these cameras, and many of them do not know the details themselves. But it is the answer to the most common question: no, an aura camera does not see anything floating around your head. How aura colors are read in the interpretive tradition is covered in our guide to aura colors and their meanings. That reading is a tradition, not a measurement, whichever route you take to it. If you are planning a visit, our guide on what to expect at your first psychic fair helps you budget time and money.

GDV, Bio-Well and modern electrography

In Russia the Kirlian line of research continued. From the 1990s the physicist Konstantin Korotkov in Saint Petersburg developed Gas Discharge Visualization, or GDV, marketed today under names such as Bio-Well. The ten fingertips are placed one by one on a glass electrode, a camera records the discharge digitally, and software maps sectors of each fingertip to organs and projects the results onto a graphic of the whole person, complete with chakras and energy scores. The hardware is cleaner than the old film plates, and some studies do find correlations between readings and stress or skin moisture. What is missing is evidence that the organ mapping is valid or that the device can detect disease. The assignment of finger sectors to organs comes from the acupuncture and electroacupuncture tradition, not from an anatomical connection.

If you encounter a GDV scan at a wellness expo, it helps to keep two questions apart. Does the device measure something real? Yes: a discharge that varies with moisture and arousal. Does the chart it produces tell you something about your liver, your heart chakra or your future? There is no evidence for that, and a practitioner who offers a diagnosis based on it is stepping outside what the method can support.

Why the image still moves us

None of this is meant to spoil your photo. A Kirlian image is beautiful: a leaf standing in violet fire, a fingertip with a crown of light. It shows something real, namely that a living, moist body behaves differently in an electric field from a dead, dry object. And an aura portrait can be an occasion to reflect on yourself, the way a tarot card can. The question is only what you do with it. If you use your aura photo as a mirror for an hour of honest self-questioning, you have gained something. If you turn it into a diagnosis, a reason to buy expensive cleansings, or a fear that your aura has a hole in it, you have let a sweat meter be sold to you as an oracle.

If you are interested in perceiving an energy field without technology, our guide on how to see an aura walks through the exercises and explains the role of afterimages and contrast in what people report seeing. And if the question underneath is why rituals and readings can change how we feel even when the mechanism is not what it claims, our honest piece Do spells actually work? looks at the research on expectation and open-label placebos.

Voices from practice

Some patterns come up again and again when people talk about these devices. Practitioners who once owned Kirlian equipment often describe the moment they noticed that a cup of hot tea changed their clients' images more than any treatment did, and that this was the end of the machine for them. Operators who photograph auras at fairs sometimes say openly that the picture is a conversation starter: people come for the colors and stay for the half hour in which someone listens to them. And a common experience among visitors is having two or three aura photos taken at different booths on the same day and getting completely different colors each time. Many keep the prettiest one anyway, as a reminder that the interpretation is theirs to make.

What we do not promise

We do not claim that Kirlian photography, aura cameras or GDV devices make an aura visible; the images show a corona discharge or colors calculated from skin readings. We do not claim that any of these methods can detect illness, organ weakness or energy blockages; there is no evidence for that, and if you are worried about your health, please see a doctor. And we do not claim that a lamp, a spray or a crystal cleanses your aura; they are tools for mood and attention that help you mark a moment for yourself.

Practical: how to handle Kirlian and aura photos

• Ask which device it is. High voltage and film (Kirlian), hand sensors and a color chart (aura camera), or a fingertip scan with software (GDV). These are three different things.
• Run the moisture test in your head. If you have just walked across the fairground, had a coffee or feel nervous, you will get a different picture. That is the explanation, not your soul.
• Treat the image as a question, not an answer. Look at it and ask what you want to see in it. That is the real interpretive work, and it belongs to you.
• Do not pay for fear. Anyone who uses an aura photo to diagnose holes, attachments or blockages and immediately offers an expensive treatment is selling you the fix for a problem their device invented. Our guide on how to cleanse your aura shows simple practices that cost nothing.
• No high voltage at home. Instructions using ignition coils and Tesla coils circulate online. The voltages are dangerous. Watch a corona discharge at a science museum instead.

Frequently asked questions

Can Kirlian photography capture your aura?

No. Kirlian photography records a corona discharge, a glow of ionized air around an object placed in a high-voltage field. The differences between images are explained mainly by moisture, pressure, voltage and exposure, as a 1976 study in Science showed.

Who invented Kirlian photography?

The name comes from Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, who developed the method in Krasnodar from 1939 onward. Electrographic images existed long before them: Lichtenberg in 1777, Navratil in 1889, Baraduc in 1896 and Jodko-Narkiewicz in 1898.

What is the phantom leaf effect?

A Kirlian image in which a leaf with its tip cut off appears whole. The effect could not be reliably repeated under controlled conditions; where it did appear, residue left on the plate by the whole leaf explained it.

How does an aura camera work?

Sensors under your hands measure mainly skin resistance, and software assigns colors to the readings according to the manufacturer's own chart, then lays them as a cloud around an ordinary portrait. The colors are calculated, not photographed.

Can GDV or Bio-Well detect illness?

There is no evidence that it can. The devices record corona discharges at the fingertips; the mapping of finger sectors to organs and chakras comes from the acupuncture tradition, not from demonstrated anatomical connections.

Why does my aura photo look different every time?

Because skin moisture, temperature and arousal change constantly, and because every device uses its own color chart. The difference between two photos says more about the moment and the machine than about you.

Is it safe to build a Kirlian device at home?

We advise against it. DIY instructions using ignition coils and Tesla coils circulate online, and the voltages involved can kill. If you want to see a corona discharge, visit a science museum.

Sources and further reading

• John O. Pehek, Harry J. Kyler, David L. Faust: "Image Modulation in Corona Discharge Photography", Science 194 (1976), pp. 263 to 270.
• Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder: Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Prentice-Hall, 1970.
• Thelma Moss: The Probability of the Impossible, Tarcher, 1974.
• Arleen J. Watkins, William S. Bickel: "A Study of the Kirlian Effect", The Skeptical Inquirer 10/3 (1986).
• Konstantin Korotkov: Human Energy Field: Study with GDV Bioelectrography, Backbone, 2002.
• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: "De nova methodo naturam ac motum fluidi electrici investigandi", Novi Commentarii Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis, 1777.