Bedtime Bulb v2 [0], a light bulb that emits less blue light than other lighting, is finally shipping. It took years to get it right, but we figured out how to make a relatively energy efficient bulb that emits infrared and dims smoothly with any dimmer.
My team is also about to ship Atmos [1], a lamp for the bedside that automatically shifts from higher-blue light during the daytime to low blue light at night.
It’s a combination of factors: you must reduce both blue light and intensity of light to avoid suppressing melatonin. Just reducing blue light might help a little, but it still suppresses melatonin. Melatonin levels and circadian phase shifts scale with total irradiance even if blue-depleted; basically, dimming the lights is really effective.
That’s why our products focus on both intensity and color change (but we lead with blue light reduction since it’s easier to grasp).
Also, if you look at our specs, you’ll see that we don’t use pure amber or red light; we use very low-blue white light with high color rendering. We have yet to do the study on this, but you can read surprisingly well with our lighting at a very low intensity (enough to make your mom angry that you are hurting your eyes), whereas with lower CRI sources, you would have to make them brighter to achieve the same visual acuity.
There is some emerging research that IR may play a role in melatonin production locally in cells, which is why we added it to the bulb. Early days for this scientifically, but Scott Zimmerman and associated researchers suggest wideband IR may be effective, even if it’s only 20-30% of the visible intensity.
Very cool, what’s the temperature range/wavelengths? (good idea to specify it on the product page - otherwise it’s unclear how is it different from other lightbulbs)
The bulb ranges from 1700K to 2100K (it warm dims)
Atmos ranges from 1800K to 5700K
Maybe not the most obvious, but for both products, it’s in the tech specs under Quality of Light. We try to be very detailed with what we publish there. Thanks!
Indeed there are very detailed specs on the bottom of the page!
It’s not obvious because I didn’t get there - I expected it to be one of the expanding sections with “Product Details” and so on. (I.e. when you have expanding sections to start with, it’s standard that all the information is the sections, and users are trained not to scroll down).
Is it possible for the bulb to gradually lose brightness as the night goes on? The default of a light bulb being as strong as 4am as it is at 1am is certainly simple, but does not make for a good nighttime experience.
With the Atmos lamp, yes! It constantly makes very minor, imperceptible changes every few seconds. I also developed an app, currently in public beta, for Philips Hue that does this as well [0].
We're working on a Nest-style ML feature for the Atmos lamp that learns your intensity preferences and automatically applies them. And we have a whole bunch smart circadian products we're working on—something for the desk and workspace next.
For Bedtime Bulb v2, not out-of-the-box because it's all analog electronics, but we REALLY want people to dim it gradually throughout the evening. If you want to automate dimming, the Leviton Smart Dimmer we offer on the site will allow you to control it with any of the popular smart home platforms.
Why isn't Bedtime Bulb smart? Bedtime Bulb v1 was our MVP, and we focused on getting the quality of light right over adding any smart features. It turns out, many of our customers have told us they don't want anything smart. So when we made v2, we focused on doubling down on quality of light features: infrared, warm dimming, "Perfect Dimming" (smooth dimming with any TRIAC or ELV dimmer), really high CRI/R9/TM-30, etc.
Smart bulbs are definitely a future possibility, but right now, we have the analog line (Bedtime Bulb v2) and smart line of fully-integrated lamps (Atmos).
The Philips bulbs are more general purpose bulbs that would replace your "soft white" 2700K bulbs. I think they dim down to around 2200K. Otherwise, the specs are pretty typical for LED bulbs in terms of color quality, flicker, and dimmability.
Bedtime Bulb v2 starts at 2100K, much warmer, and dims down to 1700K. BBv2 has infrared. The flicker is very low: under 1% at 120 Hz; the best I have seen in any dimmable bulb. It is also designed to dim perfectly with all TRIAC and ELV dimmers (basically, any standard dimmer), which no other LED bulb can claim to do.
Side note: the term "flicker-free" is a total lie, so we stopped using it. I have seen lighting with up to 50% claiming to be flicker-free. Pretty much all lighting has some flicker. The term is just not true.
very interesting. Can I control these with home assistant?
I already have a wind down dimming schedule on my entire home. It changes brightness and color temperature gradually over 2 hours. How do these bulbs compare with philips hue?
Yes, the bulb can be controlled with a smart dimmer like the Leviton model we sell on our site, or the Lutron Caseta plug-in dimmer.
These bulbs are not smart and do not have a full RGB array. But what you gain is way higher color quality even at low color temperature (1700K), much lower flicker, and infrared.
Atmos is a smart lamp, and we will get our Matter certification in early 2026. This one is also not RGB, but it has extremely high color quality in the whites and no blue spike. Flicker is lower and at a way higher frequency (32 kHz). We haven't updated the specs on the site yet as we are wrapping the calibration, but the CRI is 98 on the Atmos lamp.
My team is also about to ship Atmos [1], a lamp for the bedside that automatically shifts from higher-blue light during the daytime to low blue light at night.
[0] https://restfullighting.com/bbv2
[1] https://restfullighting.com/atmos