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Let’s paint a picture. It’s morning. You roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee, and sit in the living room next to a table lamp. The lamp casts a warm orange glow, perfect for helping you wake up after being in the dark all night. You get dressed, drive to work, and as you sit at your desk, your eyes must adjust to the bright commercial lighting overhead. While it is stark and cool and causes you to miss the table lamp glow at home, it does provide you with better visibility at the office.
Why is this? The warm glow comes from a lower color temperature, while cool stark lighting that puts off a blue hue comes from a higher color temperature. Color temperature plays a huge part in selecting the correct lighting for certain spaces. In fact, there is an art to it. From restaurants and bedrooms to offices and retail stores, picking the perfect color temperature is so important. There is a time and place for each, but we’ll get to that later.
Now let’s talk about Kelvin.
Meet our good friend Kelvin, also known as the unit that measures color temperature. Rather than describing light as “warm” like your table lamp or “cool” in your office, we can use the Kelvin temperature scale to convey exactly how warm or cool we want our light output to be. The lower the color temperature, the warmer the light. The higher the color temperature, the cooler the light.
While lumens measure the brightness of a light source, degrees Kelvin measures the color of the light produced by the bulb. While the lamp in your home has a lower color temperature of 2700K, displaying that orange glow like the amber color of a flame, the overhead lighting in your office would have a higher color temperature, probably 4000K or 4500K.
Now let’s take a look at the three main ranges of color temperature and how they are used.
Kitchen with 3500K lighting
It’s right before sunset. You are in the height of “golden hour,” the time of day when the sunlight is softer and redder than any other time. There’s a reason photographers and cinematographers call this the “magic hour.”
Lower color temperatures can be likened to the “golden hour” of lighting. When you think of relaxing in a cozy space, you probably also think of that amber glow produced by bulbs with a color temperature ranging between 2700K and 3500K. This type of lighting is typically found in residential spaces, most often decorated in earth tones that are enhanced by warmer color temperatures – specifically reds, oranges, and yellows. In your bedroom, dining room, and living room, it’s nice to have lighting that is soft on the eyes, similar to that golden glow right before the sun sets.
When you are sitting in a restaurant, you’ll notice that they use warmer lighting, too. The benefits of lower color temperatures for a space like a restaurant or a coffee shop is that orange hues can make food look more appetizing as well as put customers in a more relaxed state. Guests enjoy eating in dim lighting as it creates a more inviting ambience and reminds them of the table lamp at home rather than the lighting in the office.
Kitchen with 4100K lighting
Have you ever walked into a store, caught a glimpse of yourself in a mirror on the wall, and thought, “Who is that?” When you got dressed at home, you didn’t have those bright fixtures blaring down on you, displaying all your imperfections for the world to see. Warm lighting tends to make people look better than cool lighting.
On the bright side, however, these cooler lighting fixtures are often in offices, some retail stores, and other spaces that require task lighting because they make it easier to see. These bulbs produce a color temperature of either 4000K or 4500K. Many people prefer a higher color temperature as it gives a cleaner appearance and highlights imperfections or color variations between objects. Because higher color temperatures enhance cool color schemes, people with homes decorated with more blues, greens, and whites will appreciate cooler lighting.
Other spaces that benefit from cooler lighting include craft rooms, makeup stores, kitchens, and applications where cleanliness and increased visibility for tasks is imperative.
Kitchen with 6500K lighting
When you’re in a place with a high color temperature, it’s hard not to notice that the sterile lighting puts off a harsh blue hue. In addition to hospitals, many museums, jewelry stores, and other applications where showcasing a product is important will use “full spectrum” or “daylight” color temperatures, ranging between 5000K to 6500K.
It’s rare that bulbs with such a cool cast of light will be found in homes. The lighting can be harsh to some people, but offices will sometimes use them as they can be associated with higher productivity.
Because color temperature has a big impact on your space, from creating the ambience to affecting the way wall paint and furniture appears, there is a certain art to picking how warm or cool your light should be. If you miss the mark and combine warm lighting with a cool color scheme or vice versa, your space could look flat and dull.
Color temperature can also mess with your perception. Sometimes, when you see something in the store, it looks a certain color, but when you bring it home, it looks completely different. This is called metamerism, which is a phenomenon that occurs when two colors that are not actually the same (they reflect different wavelengths of light) appear the same under certain lighting conditions. This can also happen to paint colors if colors become distorted by brightness or color rendering, so we have detailed how you can choose paint colors in another blog post.
Having your color scheme in mind and checking the color temperature on a bulb before purchasing is crucial for getting the best look in your space.
