A room with a hue

It’s 3pm on a Tuesday and I’m sitting nude in a bath that looks like it was drawn by Rainbow Brite at Soothe Your Senses Day Spa. But hey, it’s all in the name of healing. The spa’s array of alternative-healing treatments lures patrons looking to quell their inner turmoil through intuitive readings, healing touch or—like me—by sitting in a disco bath for a half hour. 

The treatment I’m intrigued by is called “color bathing” and it’s the most eye-pleasing way to treat ailments. The idea is simple…sort of: The body is composed of seven energy centers called chakras, each of which corresponds to certain emotions, regions of the body and a particular color. When trouble hits—whether it be of the physical, mental, emotional or spiritual variety—the chakras become imbalanced, leading to more problems. 

Enter the color bath, one of several treatments used in chromatherapy (a fancy word that means “healing with color”). Designed to calibrate chakras, color baths surround imbalanced bathers with the chakra light they need most so that the body’s largest organ—the skin—will absorb the energy it (supposedly) needs to be healthy. 

“Color balances your body on a vibrational level and when you bathe in something, you get more of it—even more than you would if you were to ingest it,” says Sharon Mathieu, head of massage at the spa and an alternative healer for more than 20 years.

I begin the service by choosing the chakra color I need. Because I’m getting over a fairly awful breakup, red/pink—the shades associated with love, the heart and circulatory conditions—seem appropriate. Folks with other conditions like depression or loss of appetite, lethargy or joint inflammation, or anxiety and lymphatic issues should choose orange, green or violet, respectively. If you’re at a loss for which color will amp up your mood, Mathieu is more than happy to make a few suggestions. And you can always change your color once the bath is drawn. 

Next comes the color bath, essentially a regular tub with colored light and soundtracked by a ten-minute meditation CD in which a woman’s voice tells me to “think of your feet as the Earth’s roots.” After 30 minutes of soaking in pink water, I feel very relaxed. But to me, that’s not shocking—a half hour in the tub at home would also be calming.

In my opinion, instead of investing in a color bath, you should use your $25 to buy a flashlight, some colored plastic wrap, and a few candles. Throw in an extra $10 and I’ll personally come to your house to tell you in a soothing voice that your feet are the Earth’s roots. Better yet, invest in any of Soothe Your Senses’ amazing massages. Maybe it takes more than color to solve issues of the heart; maybe it just takes a different kind of treatment.

6260 N Broadway at Rosemont Ave (773-262-4246, sootheyoursenses.com). $25 for 30 minutes.