cover image What Color is Your Aura?: Personality Spectrums for Understanding and Growth

What Color is Your Aura?: Personality Spectrums for Understanding and Growth

Barbara Bowers. Pocket Books, $7.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-66084-0

Bowers, an executive consultant who holds a Ph.D. from the Mind College of San Diego, claims an experiential basis for her system of identifying a person's aura``the luminous egg-shaped cloud of pulsing energy that surrounds the human body and extends out from the body about six feet.'' Auras have three bands of color, but in Bowers's 98-item Personality Spectrums questionnaire, she investigates only the color band closest to the human body. She provides a detailed personality profile for each of the 14 possible aura colors, including information on how aura hue is reflected in mental attitudes, emotional traits, financial choices and other behaviors. The book is intelligently written and, despite its subject, largely free of New Age jargon. In fact, Bowers's system bears less resemblance to astrology or numerology than it does to the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, a psychological test that has intrigued some yuppies with its pop-psychological insights. (Jan.)