I Hated How I Looked. Then I Fixed My Bathroom Lighting.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s that ghoul-faced goblin in front of me, and what are they doing in my bathroom? We’ve all been there—battling beauty standards while brushing our teeth, mustering the willpower to embrace self-love while staring into the abysses of our pores. Most mornings I wake up with something of a scowl, ready to curse whatever bird dares chirp cheerfully outside my window. There’s something cruel about having to start every day confronting my appearance when I am at my lowest emotionally and physically. Reconstructive surgery being out of my budget, and dawn being immovable, I wondered how much I could change my whole self-loathing situation by tweaking something smaller: lighting.

The lighting in my bathroom was horrible: no windows and a single overhead bubble fixture that I had long hated but didn’t know what to do with. My bathroom is a pint-size Manhattan thing, barely room for a toilet, sink, and shower, and the mirror, so I figured it didn’t need much. I have a rent stabilized apartment, so there was no way I was moving, and I didn’t have oodles of extra cash lying around, so intense electrical work was off the table. Whatever I did would have to be cosmetic.

But what to do? Turn to the experts, of course. Randy Sabedra, principal at RS Lighting Design in New York City, teaches lighting design at Parsons School of Design and walked me through a way to approach bathroom lighting. The first step is to decide if the room is actually a full bathroom or just a powder room; the latter generally requires less particular lighting because it’s usually not used for more intensive personal maintenance operations, like shaving or applying a full face of makeup. For a full bathroom, it’s worth diving into some technical considerations, like light intensity, color, and more.  

Sabedra runs through a bunch of numbers with me. Color rendering index is a rating of how well colors show up under the light. The baseline 100 score is set by incandescent bulbs, and "a number ninety-plus is important when you’re looking at yourself in a mirror," Sabedra says, adding that many newer LEDs meet this benchmark. Better color rendering means you will probably look a little more human under the light and not gray or washed out.

Then there’s the color temperature of the light. It can be blueish—cool—or lean red—warm. Generally, Sabedra says, regardless of your skin tone, warmer light is better to give yourself a touch of vigorous flush, the same idea behind putting reddish blush on a cheek. Blue light may make you look undead. Something between 2,500 and 2,700 Kelvin should work in a bathroom, he says.

The final metric he gives me is about a measurement of light intensity called foot-candles. You should have about 30 foot-candles hitting your face, and an easy way to approximate that is by getting a light that gives off at least 1,000 delivered lumens. (Delivered lumens is a measure of how much light the assembled fixture emits; initial lumens is a measure of what the light source emits but may be diminished by bulbs or screens in the fixture.) All of these metrics, he says, should be available in the manufacturer info about a light.

As for placement, "the number one rule is to never put light above a person’s head to cast downward," Sabedra says, confirming my need to get rid of Mr. Bubble overhead. Overhead lighting streaks the face with shadows and accentuates wrinkles. "The light source actually wants to come from directly in front of a person standing in front of a mirror, from either fixtures above and below or left and right," he says. Be sure to cover both sides, and ideally have lighting all around. The lights should be at least as large as a person’s head to give full coverage, so he advises at least 12 inches wide for horizontal lighting and 16 inches tall for vertical. 

"Now there's a third distribution of light that often gets forgotten," Sabedra tells me, "and that is the glow." This is light that washes the wall behind you when you’re standing at your mirror and ensures that you have a clear silhouette when you see yourself. Especially if you have darker hair, this ensures that you contrast at least slightly with whatever’s behind you and you can get a good look at any flyaways or anything in your profile. In a small space, Sabedra says, the lighting at the mirror is probably enough to create this.

Felicia Hung, design director at New York lighting studio In Common With, tells me that she loves a dimmable bathroom light. "If you’re doing your makeup, and you need to see very clearly, you can turn up something that’s a little bit more like three-thousand Kelvin and get more precise," she says. "But if you’re taking a bath or doing something a little more soothing, you can kind of dim it down." She adds that most of her studio’s fixtures are "warm on dim," meaning their light gets warmer when dimmed, mimicking candle light, and suggests finding something similar. I ask her if I should be careful putting just any light in the bathroom, and she suggests finding something damp-rated, meaning it’s been approved for areas that may get, well, damp. Wet-rated lighting is only necessary for something in the shower.

Stylistically, I’m into an industrial vibe, and something like that seemed like it would fit the institutional look of my bathroom. Rather than trying to turn the space into something more polished than it was, I thought I could lean into the grunge. Fluorescent lights came to mind, and I liked the idea of just throwing up some Dan Flavin-esque tubes in a warm white on either side of my mirror and calling it a day.

I don’t have a lot of money to spend on home projects, so I don’t typically start by looking at the well curated shops I know and love; instead, I’m left with what I can conjure up from various megaretailers. In this case, most of what I found there seemed scaled for massive hangar-like spaces, not petite New York pads. To my surprise, though, my search results told me that the very popular Hay Neon LED tube lights were on sale at Design Within Reach for about $28 each. That seemed like a steal. I couldn’t find info how they matched up to most of the metrics my experts gave me, but the lights seemed to fit the spirit of their advice: warm, large, and wall-mountable. The other affordable options from home supply stores didn’t seem super user friendly or look as elegant, so I bought two medium-size Hay tubes in warm white; including shipping and taxes, they were $77.95 total.

Installing the Hay lights vertically on either side of my mirror was simple but not painless. They come with two wall clips, but one of mine broke. Fortunately, I was able to find something similar online. The power cords are longer than I needed, so I looped them up with white tape to make the excess as discreet as possible. I glued a cord cover to the wall and ran some cord through that to clean things up a bit and keep anything from dipping too close to the sink. The end result isn’t as clean as a hardwired solution, but for a rental revamp, it’s pretty tidy.

My existing light switch doesn’t control the wall outlet, so turning them on and off the way I wanted presented another problem. Each light has its own power switch, and I didn’t want to have to turn each on individually, so I got an outlet adapter with a switch on it and plugged them into that. There’s a slight lag when I turn them on with that, but it’s barely noticeable. Dimmability will have to wait for my upgrade.

But those are all asterisks to the main result: the lovely new lighting. My whole bathroom now seems quieter somehow. When I turn the old overhead light back on, everything gets caught up in a storm of harsh contrasts and shadows, but the wall lights create an even, almost museum-like calm, so now I just leave the bubble light off. I used to jump in and out of that space; now I catch myself lingering, enjoying how the light bathes my skin.

The light is warm without being yellow and bright enough to render details but gentle enough that my eyes don’t hurt if I look directly at the bare bulbs—something I was concerned about with the more utilitarian options I considered. The lights are almost four feet long, well beyond Sabedra’s minimums, and they illuminate all of my body that I can see in my mirror. They’re enough for the small space and give me that glow that Sabedra talked about.

I test the lighting out with a selfie tip from Sabedra: Instead of holding the phone awkwardly and photographing the mirror, I tape the phone to the mirror and use the timer. I have never looked better in a picture I’ve taken of myself.

I am reborn. I no longer start the day with middle-school realness; now I am welcomed by a gentle radiance. My daily ablutions feel glamorous, the work of tending to a bronzed statue in a sacred space. I’ve noticed that I generally feel more confident. I even got another Hay tube light and installed it horizontally next to my work table to light me for work video calls. It’s a whole new era: All I had to do was see myself in a better light.

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