Photo: Photograph by Beth Sacca, Set design by Phillip Nuveen
The lightbulb was flickering over my head. Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb. I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome.
LED bulbs do this to me all the time. The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.
For most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker; CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around. My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university’s planned energy savings.
LEDs were going to be different. Their widespread appearance on store shelves was supposed to mark not another depressing trade-off but rather a Nobel-worthy breakthrough: They provided brilliant illumination at a fraction of the old energy costs and were nearly immortal by the old tungsten standard. The federal government has fully committed. Some rearguard action by the Trump administration delayed the process, but a new lighting-efficiency standard has finally taken effect. The Department of Energy is scheduled to start penalizing incandescent distributors and retailers this month, levying fines of as much as $542 per illicit bulb, with full enforcement of the ban beginning in August.
The plan is for LEDs to be the only available form of artificial lighting. Already, the old bulbs are dwindling to nothing on retailers’ shelves. You have to know where to look — mom-and-pop hardware stores, mostly — to get your hands on a beige-sleeved pack of Hungarian-made GE Básica bulbs or a yellow pack of GE Blanco Suaves, both with a bold stamp on the side reading, NOT FOR SALE FOR USE IN THE UNITED STATES.
Years ago, I got a head start, joining the LED revolution with fervor. Screwing one into a socket vacated by an incandescent felt like the easiest good-citizen points I’d ever earned, as if I could keep on doing things exactly as before but with better and greener results. And the light coming out of the things was — well, it was light, right? I don’t remember how long it took to notice, or think I had noticed, a series of letdowns: a faded look to the page of a storybook, a flicker in the corner of the eye, those sudden unexplained failures or half-failures. A slate-blue sock that was indistinguishable from a charcoal-gray one till I brought them over by the window. A certain unreality was creeping in.
We were renovating our apartment, and one day our contractor summoned me to the bathroom in dismay. He adjusted the dimmer switch he’d just installed, and a new LED fixture began strobing like we were in a seven-by-eight-foot basement dance club. We gave up and had him install a normal switch. The quirks were becoming malfunctions were becoming betrayals. Things I might once have ignored caught my eye. Out in the world, I noticed more and more public spaces had a frigid cast and a liminal flicker. The interiors of bubble-tea shops and ice-cream parlors took on a queasy aspect. Getting up in the early-morning darkness in a San Francisco Airbnb, I could see the bedside lamplight trembling.
I started to confide in people that I was seeing things, that the light was wrong, and usually they knew exactly what I was talking about. Over lunch, a friend unspooled an epic account of his quest for dimmable bulbs that would actually dim. A stranger in a shared taxi forwarded me a blog post he’d written about his conviction that the color of objects lit by LEDs was washed out and about his incredulity at how fast they failed.
A technology that was once the epitome of simplicity (“How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?”) has become an ever-branching set of complications. Where before I would pick up a pack of 60-watt soft-white incandescents at the hardware store, I now search the internet for the highest-rated equivalent LEDs, then systematically cross-check those equivalences point by point. Everything you used to know about indoor illumination is outmoded. For 60 watts’ worth of incandescent light, you’re looking for about 800 lumens of LED output. To make that light come out the approximate color that the old bulb generated, you need to check the listed bulb temperature and make sure it’s 2,700 degrees Kelvin.
Got it? Hang on. If you want the objects that the light shines on to look the same, you’re getting into a different color question, specifically the color-rendering index. Your incandescent bulb — a glowing analog object, its light coming from a heated wire — had a CRI of 100 for a full unbroken spectrum. Your typical LED bulb, shining with cold digital electroluminescence, will not. Some colors will be missing or just different. If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher. The box may not list any CRI at all.
Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.
To study this stuff, to attempt to stare at light and understand it, makes you suspicious of any claims to objective truth. Snap a picture of an oddly tinted space and Apple’s software will convert the image according to what it has machine-learned that white ought to be. The eye-brain system does its own constant white balancing, too. I downloaded an extremely erratic color-temperature app to try to get some grounding, an amateur feel for what professionals are trained to spot. I interrogated lighting designers, engineers, decorators, and researchers.
Most of them were enthusiasts about the technology. They praised LEDs, at their best, for their unmatched efficiency, precision, and practical power. They also said things like “There’s a lot of nonperformance” and “Super–beta phase” and “Don’t give up on beauty” and “You’re going to spend $200 on four bulbs at Home Depot” and “You start seeing grayness.”
Grayness — I was definitely seeing grayness. There ought to be a term for what happens when the light gets weaker and everyone acts as if it’s as strong as always. By the science, by the ethics, even by law, the reign of the LED is a certainty. It is taking the place of the most standard and omnipresent technology we know. And yet, when you flip the light switch, you don’t know what’s going to happen.