In the last post, we discovered – to our significant bafflement – that the magical CieAura has ShooTag‘s Melissa Rogers as its Chief Science Officer. Today we’re going to look at some of CieAura’s claims, and indeed, dwell a little on the ‘science’ that this wonderful gadget is supposed to use.

I will make it super clear here – since the ShooTag people seemed to have a lot of trouble with this concept – that the science part of this whole swindle is my major concern. If the claim of this device was that its working mechanism is magic, then I’d not be interested in trying to approach such a claim via a rational process. That’s a zero sum game. But the appointment of a ‘Science Officer’ clearly nails CieAura’s pretensions to the mast. In my book, spectacular scientific claims must offer spectacular and unassailable proof.

Before we go on, I have a confession to make – I realised this morning that I’ve actually examined CieAura in the past. In the comments on this post, Brian J visits the Cow to tell us about his experience with them. He found his way here because CieAura was even mentioned in the same context as ShooTag! But I completely forgot about it. In my defense, there are just so many of these damn scams that one tends to be very much like another and I truly forget which I’ve looked at. At that time (June 2011), CieAura was probably just getting its market penetration. Brian J’s story is an interesting one, and if you have the time, I recommend you read the discussion between him and myself. It’s very enlightening in regard to what we’ll go on to examine in this post, and the next.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. First I’ll give you a little breakdown of the product. CieAura manifests as not one, but eight different modalities. The website contends that it will help you with pain, sleep, fatigue, allergies, libido and weight loss, protect you from EMF and enhance your sporting prowess. CieAura comes in the form of holographic ‘chips’ that you attach to your skin with skin-coloured tape. This is what they look like:

The image is of a pyramid, in case you can’t see it. Pay special attention to that, because we’ll revisit the concept later.

Now I will point out here that it is frighteningly cheap to make a hologram of the kind you see here. A hologram is nothing more than an array of tiny little refraction scratches in the surface of thin plastic. There is nothing special about this process. Billions of these holograms are manufactured every year and they are made as simply as you might print a document on your home computer.

A ten second search gave me hundreds of options for getting sheets of holograms printed (mainly in China) for as little as 0.01 cents per piece (a piece usually consisting of one sheet of ten or twenty), and I bet you could even do better with a trade order. A single sheet of 10 CieAura holographic stickers will cost you 35 dollars. This is an absolutely astonishing manufacturing-to-sales profit ratio of 3500%.

The CieAura chips are supposed to be efficacious for 2-3 days. So, in the main, one packet of CieAura stickers is going to last you no more than a few weeks, and in all probability, customers are encouraged to buy multiple packs. You can see quite clearly that if these things are actually being purchased, this is a goldmine. ((Of course, the assertion that some aspect of the holograms ‘wear out’ is abject nonsense, and in this respect we see a departure from the mechanism of ShooTag, which, although it was still nonsense, at least retains faint plausibility in the notion of the product efficacy being limited over time by wear and tear. Perplexingly, elsewhere on the CieAura site we find this: “Formulas cannot be changed unless bent or cut. Data on a hologram lasts over 50 years, so shelf life of CieAura products is almost unlimited.” So what is it, exactly, that limits the efficacy of CieAura holograms to two days?)) It’s fairly difficult to get a good metric for the purchase success of CieAura. The web turns up many testimonials, but that’s vague endorsement. We can probably assume moderate sales success, which, due to the profit ratio, is no doubt a significant revenue. But that’s only a small facet of the money machine that is CieAura, as we will see in a bit.

In any case, today we’re looking at the science claims of CieAura, so we’ll leave the business aspects for the moment and have a little gander at how this wonderful product is supposed to work.

I’m not going to quote the text from the CieAura ‘Science’ page in its entirety, because, to be honest, it’s just plain gobbledegook (similar to what we saw in the ShooTag ‘science’ claims). You can go read it if you want, it’s here. To me it seems like this:

“CieAura does magical and amazing things that will make your life better. We here at CieAura don’t really understand the way the world works, and we don’t think you do either. Ancient peoples used magic and so we thought that if we took magic, and added pretendy science words to it, you might believe it’s not magic. We’d convince you it works by saying something like this: imagine something irrelevant in the real world. Now imagine your body is like that thing. CieAura magically makes that irrelevant thing relevant to your body, and fixes whatever problem you want by making magic equivalence. Oh, and by the way, Energy.”

Elsewhere on the CieAura site, we get references to lasers, quantum fields and more energy. Proper science is referred to as ‘orthodox science’, but is used to attempt to leverage some CieAura credibility despite the condescension. Perhaps the most peculiar thing of all is this:

NOTE: It is often misconstrued that frequencies and vibrations are the basis for the CieAura Chip design. To clarify: It has been determined that frequencies and/or vibrations are not the rudimentary cause of brain and body communication. Research has shown that frequencies and vibrations are an energy force that can be measured, and when absorbed by the body, appear to create certain effects. We have found that when the frequencies and vibrations are removed from the body, there remains, what is referred to as, intrinsic energies, which operate as the body’s natural communication force. These “intrinsic energies” are not measurable in the same manner as frequencies and vibrations are measurable, and because of this, we use the body’s natural forces to antidotally determine the existence of these forces. For these reasons, we consider it factually incorrect to describe the results of our technology to be driven by frequencies or vibrations.

Any further discussion on how the chips work would reveal proprietary production technologies.

So after all Melissa Rogers’ previous huffing and puffing about ‘frequencies’ in her attempted scientific explanations of ShooTag, it appears she’s gone cold on that particular concept. Or maybe ShooTag works on frequencies and CieAura works on not-frequencies. From the above explanation, it’s completely impossible to figure out how it does work, and this paragraph sounds to me like this:

“Magic, frequencies, magic, magic, bullshit, waffle, waffle, magic, bullshit and oh, we can’t tell you how it really works because secrets.”

Another berserk thing that we discover from the CieAura pages, is that the holographic magic of CieAura is happily riding along on the coattails of another dubious area of medical pseudoscience – acupuncture.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is an energy medicine. Acupuncturists dating back 3000 years also employed these energetic principles of positive and negative or yin and yang with the neutral center energy of mind being the way of the Tao… The manufacturer of CieAura Transparent Holographic Chips has discovered a way to adhesively charge intrinsic energies into holograms for the purpose of influencing the human cycle. Our Chips influence key points to create the desired effect. The natural meridians in our body get out of balance and cause blockages in the natural energy flow between the vital organs, cells and tissues of the body. The body works to connect these energy flows; however, without help, there is rarely if ever a balance in our body that keeps energy, concentration, stamina, and plus and minus (Yin and Yang) at the optimum level.

So what we have here, in essence, is a highly questionable modality of ancient folk medical treatment being influenced by an unspecified and quite unknown mechanism of physical science to return an outcome that the manufacturers – in their own words – explicitly do not guarantee (we’ll examine this situation in the next instalment). Would you spend 35 bucks on that? I’d rather go to a movie and have a choc top.

In short, there is no science here. Once again we find Melissa Rogers throwing around all kinds of sciencey sounding stuff in order to give CieAura a patina of credibility, but wholly failing to make any sense whatsoever, and certainly not putting forward any rational explanation as to why CieAura is anything but a flimsy piece of plastic film with a picture etched onto it. It is significant to note here that these kinds of claims and techniques were specifically responsible for the comprehensive banning of Power Balance bands here in Australia. The manufacturers of Power Balance, which also “used holographic technology” to “resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body”, admitted that the claims they made for their product were baseless, and they were compelled cease trading in Australia and to refund the purchase price of a Power Balance band to all customers who requested it.

Finally, today, we’ll take a look at a YouTube clip:

I don’t know the bona fides of the chap doing the demonstration here, but this is the hoary old ‘balance’ test, which, despite the guy’s claims of it ‘not being a trick’, is exactly that, and has been shown to be such so many times that it’s amazing that anyone still falls for it. ((It has been charitably said that the people who carry out these demonstrations may not be consciously affecting the outcome, but I have trouble believing that. Do the experiment yourself, and see if you can do it without knowing you’re doing it…)) Here’s exactly how it’s done, and how the purveyors of the million dollar Power Balance scam were toppled:

In the next post we’ll go on to take a look at CieAura’s business practices, and some amusing legal stuff. Join me, won’t you?