Lighting guide
The best light for reading at night
Reading in bad light does not damage your eyes, despite what you were told as a child. It does tire them, quickly, and it makes you stop reading sooner than you meant to. Three things decide whether a light is comfortable to read by, and only one of them is brightness.
Position matters more than power
Light should arrive over your shoulder and fall onto the page, from behind and slightly to one side. That way the page is lit and the source is out of your field of view. A light in front of you, or directly overhead, puts the bright source and the page in the same glance, and your pupils spend the whole evening adjusting between the two.
This is why a ceiling bulb is the worst reading light in any room. It is directly overhead, which means your own head casts a shadow onto whatever you are holding.
Warm, not bright
For reading after dark, a warm bulb around 2700 K is easier on the eyes than a cool white one, and it does not interfere with winding down for sleep the way cooler light does. Brightness matters less than people assume: somewhere around 400 to 600 lumens at the page is plenty, which is a 6 to 9 watt LED.
If you read on a screen rather than paper, the same rule applies in reverse. A small warm lamp beside you reduces the contrast between a bright screen and a dark room, which is the main cause of tired eyes at night.
The shade does real work
- An evenly lit shade. If one patch of the shade is visibly brighter than the rest, that hot spot sits in your peripheral vision all evening.
- A shade that blocks the bulb. You should not be able to see the filament from a normal seated position.
- Height that puts the shade edge near eye level. Too low and light spills upward into your eyes. Too high and it lands behind you.
A simple test
Sit where you normally read, with the lamp on and the ceiling light off. If you can see the bulb, the lamp is too short or the shade too shallow. If the page has a shadow across it, the light is coming from the wrong side. If you find yourself squinting, the problem is contrast, not brightness, and the answer is usually a second small light elsewhere in the room rather than a stronger bulb.