I know I said we were going to be looking at CieAura’s business practices today, but I thought instead that I might take a little detour, and think a bit about the central concepts behind what the product is offering. Specifically, we’re going to look at holograms, what they are, how they work and their relevance to any kind of biological or medical efficacy.

The first thing I’m going to assert is that the CieAura doesn’t use true holograms. I’ve never seen a CieAura ‘chip’ in reality, so I’m going off web images, but to me these look like ‘stacked’ or ‘2D/3D’ holos, which are found extensively in toys, credit and ID cards, and product design. These are just 2D layers which give the illusion of depth. They are stupidly easy to manufacture, and incredibly cheap, as we have seen. You can easily have them made to your own design.

It is vaguely possible that the CieAura holograms are what is known as Dot Matrix holos, and they are pretty much what they sound like: holograms made by specialized machines which stamp images into foil masters using a dot pattern. The process is somewhat similar to the way old-fashioned desktop printers worked. These kinds of holos are generally used when high levels of security are required, as they can encode what are called ‘shape scattered’ patterns. Electron-beam lithography makes even higher quality holograms still, and due to their very high resolution (up to a quite impressive 254,000 dots per inch) can encode all kinds of hard-to-copy detail. These last two are rather more expensive than stacked holos, but once you’ve made a master, it’s still relatively cheap to manufacture millions of clones.

Whatever the case, you should understand that what’s happening with all of these methods is that a machine is simply etching finely detailed patterns into a piece of metal, which is then used as a master to print the actual holograms onto plastic or metal foil.

Without wanting to get too technical about what a proper hologram is, and how it works, I’ll attempt a little explanation: even though light travels very fast (299792458 metres per second, in fact) it can be slowed down by materials it passes through, such as water or glass.

Here, the light bouncing off the pencil and reaching your eyes is slowed very slightly as it goes through the water in the glass, and when you compare it to the light coming off the pencil above the water, you can clearly see a discontinuity (and you can see that there is a depth-perception illusion in play – the pencil looks more magnified, and appears to be ‘elsewhere’ from where you know it to be). You will have seen this kind of effect countless times in your life; distortions in windows, raindrops on glass, the brilliance of cut gems like diamonds. If you wear spectacles, the warping of light by changing its speed is what helps correct your vision. Any transparent or semi-transparent medium can, and mostly always does, change the speed of light.

A lesser known example of the speed of light being altered is when you see an oily puddle on the road.

In this case, the rainbow effect is caused by the constituent parts of white light being bounced off the puddle at slightly different speeds – the white light of the sun is being separated into colours due to minute optical delays introduced by the oil/water mix on the road.

This changing of the speed of light as it goes through different material is called refraction (or diffraction, according to whether it’s reflected or transmitted). I’m sure you’ll already have made the link between oily rainbows and the holograms you see on credit cards, and indeed, you’re seeing exactly the same principle at work. The very cool thing about refraction/diffraction is that if you can slow light down controllably, and in just the right way, you can fool your eyes into thinking that the delay caused by what we call the refractive index of a material is not simply a colourful effect, but a function of distance. In other words, under certain conditions, and in just the right light, we can trick our eyes into seeing refractive changes as depth.

And this is exactly what a hologram does. The very small and highly organised grooves and pits on a holographic film refract the light in such a way as to give an illusion of depth – that’s what creates the hologram’s 3D effect. You will know from experience, that these little holograms work best when you have a very defined, single point light source, and when you view them from one angle. That’s simply because the refraction effect is most effective when it’s lined up exactly with a light source and your eye.

What I’m getting at here, of course, is that there is really nothing at all mystical about a hologram. Holograms are exploiting simple and extremely well understood properties of optics, and have no more magic in them than the magnetic strips on your credit card.

On the CieAura site we read that:

The holographic chips are actually small skin colored patches that are infused with specific formulas designed to balance the body when placed along energy sensitive points of the body called meridians. Some call the holographic chips and the results like “acupuncture without the needles”.

And…

The CieAura Chip technology communicates with the body through the human electromagnetic field. This is known as bio-magnetic transfer. It works similar to acupuncture.

And…

CieAura’s products operate from the infusion of Intrinsic Energy into a holographic chip. Intrinsic Energy is synonymous with subtle energy as used in other texts. Once the holographic chip is placed within an inch or so of the body, these energies communicate externally with the body’s energetic fields. The chip aids the body to move itself toward its optimum energetic state. The chips use physics as opposed to chemicals to externally communicate with the body’s intrinsic energy fields.

…Nothing enters the body. Intrinsic energy operates in the quantum physics area (smaller than an atom). As a result, there is currently no device capable of measuring the signal.

Let’s think carefully about what’s being claimed here: information recorded holographically (that is, by altering the refractive index of plastic to vary the frequencies of light travelling through it) is somehow ‘infused’ with ‘formulas’ that ‘communicate’ via ‘bio magnetic transfer’ and ‘intrinsic energy’ with the body’s ‘energetic field’. And this effect is not currently measurable with any known technology (how wonderfully convenient).

As we have seen before with ShooTag, this is nothing more than a collection of absurd and diffuse terms combined in a melange of completely meaningless waffle. Not one thing in the sentences above has even an ounce of scientific credibility. You can’t ‘infuse’ formulas into holograms like you would steep some herbs in hot water – that makes absolutely no sense. The term ‘biomagnetic transfer’ occurs nowhere in scientific literature because it’s bunk. ‘Intrinsic energy’ is a made-up term that means nothing at all. The human body has no ‘energetic field’ – that’s complete bullshit. And all this tied into acupuncture, which is a folk remedy that has virtually no credibility outside of a minute chance that it might have a barely discernable effect on pain. ((Acupuncture is difficult to test scientifically for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s pretty easy to tell if someone’s sticking needles into you. Nevertheless, the best science we have on it indicates that it’s ineffectual.))

It’s more than clear that all the sciencey-sounding verbage you encounter on the CieAura site is abject gibberish. It may be that Melissa Rogers is so badly educated that she really believes this baloney… but I don’t really think so. I believe that all this pseudo-mystical-sciencey stuff is smoke-and-mirrors distraction designed to deflect anyone from too-readily discerning the real purpose of CieAura.

And that purpose is what we’ll hone in on in the next instalment…