22 ms·

Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness

851 points by maxwell 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Submitted title was "Blue light is toxic to human eyes". That broke the site guidelines, which ask you to "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kjullien 8y ago
Did we not already know about this ? I remember 5+ years ago blue LEDs were pulled off of the market (at least in France) because the spectrum they emit in is way too close to uv and could burn your macula.
- kypro 8y ago
  Wait, is UV light bad for your eyes? Should I be careful about visiting bars with UV light too?
  - kjullien 8y ago
    Yes, UV rays cause damage to pretty much any organic matter, that's the reason we wear sunscreen, sunglasses, and why cheap "fake" sunglasses can be harmful for your eyes (the glass is simply tinted and does not filter out the UVs, which is what they should be doing) edit: the way I remember it is that like any type of radiation, anything that goes into your body stays there pretty much until your death, the only way to keep your "uv capital" in good shape is to be proactive about it, cant do anything retroactively. This is why about 1/3rd of Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime.
    - gomox 8y ago
      I just wanted to point out that most cheap (and therefore plastic) sunglasses are actually perfectly fine in terms of UV protection. Polycarbonate is UV opaque. If you Google this subject there are several websites where people went out and bought cheap an expensive sunglasses and had them tested and reached the same conclusion: UV protection does not justify expensive Raybans.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - MisterTea 8y ago
    Supposedly the intensity of a "black light", the UV emitting lamps found in clubs/bars/amusement attractions/etc are below the harmful threshold. I have never been comfortable in their presence as my eyes begin to fatigue and I experience discomfort. YMMV.
  - avgDev 8y ago
    Black lights used in clubs generally don't have enough power to cause eye damage or sun burn, therefore, I would not be too concerned. Lights used in something like a tanning bed, can obviously burn your skin and also damage your eyes that is why people should wear eye protection, or do the healthy thing and not tan at all.
  - btrettel 8y ago
    When I did research as an undergraduate, one of the MS students in the lab I was working in moved a powerful UV light used to cure glues from the corner of the room to the center and used it without putting a box over it as was standard procedure. Of course, he didn't look at the light himself, but he also didn't announce its use either. I saw the UV light as I was walking through the lab. It was basically a bright purple/blue light. Several hours later I was effectively blind due to pain, which continued for a few days. I basically had the equivalent of a bad sunburn on my eyes. This was one of several reasons I quit that lab. Since then I've avoided academic labs that have UV lights or lasers because I don't trust that the students follow safety procedures at all.
b_b 8y ago
For many of us whose use of these blue-light emitting computer and phone screens is necessary, what can we do about it?
- goda90 8y ago
  Well at least a start is to use software like f.lux that reduces the blue levels on the screen. There are also over screen filters and yellow tinted glasses that can filter the blue light.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    It sounds like one should use it permanently, and not just at night. But the real problem is the spectral composition of the synthetic white light on screens. Now I want fluorescent backlights back.
    - bcoates 8y ago
      Is there any reason to think that narrowband blue is worse than broadband blue? It makes for poor CRI when used as a light source but if the display blue is near the peak sensitivity frequency for blue it should result in slightly less total power being delivered to the eye than an equivalent blackbody spectrum white light.
      - pishpash 8y ago
        Maybe total power isn't what matters and peak sensitivity is also where peak damage is.
- kjullien 8y ago
  Use f.lux or an equivalent (most OS have their own implementation by now) that filters out the blue light at software/rendering level, it's not perfect but you do instantly feel the comfort it brings to your eyes. Been using f.lux for over 10 years and it also helps alot with going to sleep at night. When it's off your eyes/brain thinks that they are in daytime / broad daylight, when it's on I fall asleep 2 or 3 times faster than without.
pishpash 8y ago
I definitely feel I've been going blind, more than I should with age.
DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
Here’s the actual study, thanks to sci-hub: http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0/ratnayake2018.pdf http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0...
- superkuh 8y ago
  The post's URL actually includes links to the sci rep paper and the full text pdf paper is available from there for free for everyone. No sci-hub needed. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8 http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8 http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf
sandGorgon 8y ago
Fedora/Gnome has had "Night Light" built into the OS by default. Big difference to eye strain with it !
- Razengan 8y ago
  iOS, macOS and Windows as well.
- pishpash 8y ago
  This is not a permanent solution because simply shifting the color temperature has the side effect of generating melatonin and disrupting your circadian clock. You really need a daylight white spectrum and not concentrate all the blue-green energy in one blue spike.
corpMaverick 8y ago
From the article... To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light outside and avoid looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark." Please share any additional actionable advice.
- cheschire 8y ago
  Set your monitor to R=49, G=34, B=19
- lawlessone 8y ago
  Wear Sunscreen Start a pension.
  - downrightmike 8y ago
    Go back in time and plant a tree.
rgrove 8y ago
> To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises to [...] avoid looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark. Can someone explain why it would be worse to look at a cell phone in the dark? It's emitting the same blue light (or less, if the display gets dimmer) as it is in a bright environment. Why is that light more harmful in a dark environment?
- CapitalistCartr 8y ago
  Your pupils are dilated; you're receiving more light.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lawlessone 8y ago
  I'm not a doctor but in a dark environment your pupils would be less constricted. From what i heard this is also why sunglasses that don't block UV light are worse than not having sunglasses at all.
- colanderman 8y ago
  Your pupils are more dilated, due to the surrounding darkness, and hence let more light in. If you were to dim your screen enough to compensate, it would likely be too dark to read.
- kjullien 8y ago
  Because of the way your eyes work. If it is bright, your pupil will be shrunk, to not be blinded by the luminosity. When it is dark, your pupil will be opened wide up. It is this principle that camera apertures are based on. Now if you have your pupil wide open in a completely dark environment and put a 100% brightness screen at ~10cm of your eyes, what do you expect will happen ? Our eyes are made for nature, that means day and night, now we have technology that is akin to a handheld sun and you use this at night at 10cm of your face, our eyes are simply not equipped to handle this.
friedman23 8y ago
I use f.lux all day I don't know if I'm particularly sensitive or if it's all in my head but when I turn off f.lux, especially at night, to watch some movie or video I can physically feel my pupils dilate and it almost feels like my eyes go from being at rest to being strained.
- xur17 8y ago
  I use something similar to flux for my lightbulbs, and I've noticed the same thing when I disable it at night. My eyes are definitely strained.
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Care to link what you're using? It would be nice to modify my room to use changing color spectrum bulbs depending on the time of day.
    - xur17 8y ago
      I'm using this [0] Home Assistant component. I also use a similar component to slowly turn my lights on in the morning instead of an alarm clock, which works really well. [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/components/switch.flux/ https://www.home-assistant.io/components/switch.flux/
- degenerate 8y ago
  Same - I have flux setup to be active during work hours (at work) and evening hours (at home) so it's filtering blue light on all my devices. When I accidentally close it or turn it off for a movie, I feel like a vampire in sunlight. I have such an easier time falling asleep thanks to flux.
- danaos 8y ago
  As a linux user, I have found that Redshift works better than f.lux. It's the first thing that I install on a new machine of mine.
  - 8y ago
arprocter 8y ago
I wonder if the brightness settings have any bearing on this? If I don't dial mine way down it's very uncomfortable
lukewrites 8y ago
Can anyone recommend editor color schemes that look good when f.lux is set to heavily filter blue light?
- ninkendo 8y ago
  I’ve really started to like gruvbox lately. It’s naturally a warm color theme already so I would imagine it should still look good under a heavy blue light filter.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
Can someone say if it is harmful to use a blue light filtering software 24/7? I get its use at night, but would using it from sun up to sun down cause any problems?
- graeme 8y ago
  Only if you never went outside. Otherwise, it shouldn't. Blue light emitting screens are recent, if blue light is off, it's still more light than a book. But never going outside would mess with circadian rhythm.
gregcrv 8y ago
"to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light" But isn't this bad with other consequences? I thought the lack of blue/violet light was the cause of myopia? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/
- ectospheno 8y ago
  VSP basically owns TechShield Blue. Other manufacturers have competing products but they are all pretty horrible. The cynic in me wonders if the researchers have any ties to VSP.
- derefr 8y ago
  You can't develop myopia or hyperopia after your eyes/skull/orbital muscles are done growing. So this suggestion probably applies only to adults. Keep in mind that this is age-related macular degeneration. Your photoreceptor cells are protected by the α-tocopherol until "a person's 50s or 60s." You wouldn't need any prophylactic interventions until then.
  - niceperson 8y ago
    >You can't develop myopia or hyperopia after your eyes/skull/orbital muscles are done growing. Do you have a source for that? Would the inverse also be true?
    - derefr 8y ago
      I don't know about a source—a medical textbook? Those conditions are explicitly caused by the eye being squished out of the "proper" shape for focusing light by the way the skull and extraocular muscles end up developing. I suppose you could develop myopia later in life as a result of inflammation of the extraocular muscles (orbital myositis), but this would be 1. temporary, and 2. not treated as its own disease, but rather as a symptom.
  - graeme 8y ago
    Interesting. My myopia worsened a bit from ages 22-27 or so. Does that mean my skull and muscles were changing still?
gumby 8y ago
Many of the comments here are about displays, but what about the LEDs sold as replacement for incandescent and halogen bulbs?
- Eochei5h 8y ago
  Check the spec sheet of the bulbs, specifically the color temperature in kelvin. Ignore the "warm white" and similar marketing terms, they are too fuzzy. A LED with low color temperature and high CRI should have pretty much the same spectrum as incandescent. If you want really low temperatures look for some retro filament style LED lights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing_different_lighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing...
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    CRI unfortunately is not a good test, it still can produce very high ratings even when the spectrum is spiky.
    - namibj 8y ago
      95+CRI is an indicator for mostly lack of spikes. Look at Yuji (yujiintl.com), they seem to be the only ones selling actual high-CRI LEDs with sane pricing (i.e., no ideological markup).
      - mapmap 8y ago
        I'd like to try one of these out, but at $20 per bulb it's a a bit steep. Are you able to comment how they compare to the Feit Electric 90+ CRI bulbs sold at Costco for a few dollars a bulb?
  - pistachiopro 8y ago
    It's tricky, though, since most LED bulbs use a single wavelength of blue LEDs which get downshifted by phosphors, even in high CRI bulbs, you can have an unnaturally large spike in the blue (often around 450nm).
mafuyu 8y ago
I'm in the process of building a Philips Hue-compatible light therapy LED strip that goes above my bed, and I chose 500 nm cyan LEDs due to this concern. The goal is to have the lights gradually wake me up every morning and help align my sleep cycles, as I suffer from Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder. Figure 3[0] in the paper seems to show that 500 nm is safe, and that melanopsin has high absorption at 500nm, which has important effects on circadian rhythm[1]. Anyone more knowledgable than me know if this setup is safe? [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadian_rhythm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadia...
- priccis 8y ago
  I'm sorry I can't help you, but after reading an article posted here about melatonin I got interested in light therapy, but commercial devices are a bit expensive. Are you documenting your project?
  - mafuyu 8y ago
    Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but I might do a short writeup when I'm done. I originally purchased these nice LED strip bars with enclosure in blue[0], but after reading this site by the manufacturers of a commercial green therapy light[1], I was convinced to switch to turquoise/cyan. Turquoise isn't that popular so I wasn't able to find any strips/bars, and I got these individual 3W bead LED modules instead.[2] For the Hue integration, I'm using a Mesh Bee + UartSBee v5[3] with firmware from PeeVeeOne[4]. It outputs PWM, and I'm hooking it up to a cheapo constant current LED driver I got from Aliexpress. Since all the LEDs need to be in series for a constant current driver, I'm probably looking at a ~20V power supply to power the whole thing. My bedframe has a headboard, so I'm planning on 3D printing some mounts that clamp on top. [0]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/50CM-U-Aluminium-shell-DC-12V-36-SMD-5630-LED-Hard-Rigid-LED-Strip-Bar/332644356624 https://www.ebay.com/itm/50CM-U-Aluminium-shell-DC-12V-36-SM... [1]: http://www.sunnexbiotech.com/blue%20vs%20green%20light.html http://www.sunnexbiotech.com/blue%20vs%20green%20light.html [2]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-pcs-3W-Turquoise-Cyan-LEDs-Diode-Beads-Lamp-Chip-Emitter-700ma-3Watt-Chip-type-500nm/32812975950.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-pcs-3W-Turquoise-Cyan-LED... [3a]: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Mesh-Bee-Open-Source-Zigbee-Pro-Module-with-MCU-(JN5168)-p-1751.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/Mesh-Bee-Open-Source-Zigbee-Pro-... [3b]: https://www.seeedstudio.com/UartSBee-V5-p-1752.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/UartSBee-V5-p-1752.html [4]: https://peeveeone.com/?page_id=252 https://peeveeone.com/?page_id=252
JohnBerea 8y ago
In addition to f.lux, I also use the Dark Reader Chrome extension[1], which dynamically generates dark themes for every page you visit. It seems to make a bigger difference than using f.lux. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
- adtac 8y ago
  How does the amount of blue light we see from our computers and mobile devices compare to the blue light seen from the rest of the world quantitatively? While I agree that f.lux helps in the night, I'd guess that the impact caused by f.lux to prevent the effect mentioned in the article is pretty minimal. (Obviously, I have no citations or references; just a wild guess.)
- verta 8y ago
  Def'ly a great relief for my eye strain - using it during the day too and keeping on by default. One annoyance is that Chrome needs to let the address bar be darkened as well as it stands out like a neon tube when Dark Reader is on.
  - m_ke 8y ago
    I just use a dark chrome theme with it to get around that issue.
- kakuri 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I did not know about this. I use Stylus and dark themes for many sites, but this will be great for random sites. https://add0n.com/stylus.html https://add0n.com/stylus.html
- eggie 8y ago
  Using this on an OLED screen really makes it clear that the current standard of light backgrounds and dark text is only optimal with backlit LCD panels.
DavideNL 8y ago
Is this the same blue light as emitted by for example the Philips light therapy lamps? https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu-energy-light https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu-energy-...
- jefe_ 8y ago
  I use one of these every day, found two things, one from Philips in 2011 with some PDF documents, making claims the light is safe: http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&dct=QAD&faqview=1&refdisplay=EN_DETAILS_BLUELIGHT%20DANGER_NO&refnr=0074803&scy=US&slg=AEN http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&... 2011 was a while ago, this Stack Exchange post from 2013 seems to indicate there is a possibility for macular degeneration with use of these devices, particularly if you are already at risk for the condition: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can-blue-light-therapy-contribute-to-age-related-macular-degeneration https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can-blue-... Some googling seems to indicate there were rumors of these lights potentially causing issues, and it sounds like the Chemist article may be presenting a scientific basis for that speculation. Turned off my light for now.
codemac 8y ago
Anyone have suggestions for kindles? A lot of the "screens" I've seen on amazon have pretty terrible reviews. It's the one major source of nighttime blue light that I consume. I've largely given up using my phone / laptop in the dark, as I decided I'm an adult and can just leave the lights on. Reading in bed is one of my favorite things, and it bothers my partner to leave the lights on.
- graeme 8y ago
  What about a red light in a lamp? I use a red light to read at night. Doesn't bother my girlfriend (though she's not hugely bothered by light in general) Combine that with an e ink non backlit kindle and you'll have no blue light.
- scns 8y ago
  Yellow glasses block blue light
- smileysteve 8y ago
  The contrast of just your screen and focusing in the dark is likely damaging on its own; but you can add the red filter, and, if using kindle app, make the font white on black background. But yes, as Kindles imply, reading text printed without a backlight is preferable to backlit text, so prefer lights over the backlight.
fierybanana 8y ago
This might be relevant: https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light-and-the-retina https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light-and-the-...
onecooldev24 8y ago
I use flu.x app on my mac. Is something like this going to help if you end up on your laptop for the most part of your day.
graeme 8y ago
What about morning wakeup lights? I have one that's daylight spectrum with 93 CRI. Is this generally ok, or harmful?
JimboOmega 8y ago
I don't quite understand. Blue light - any blue light - causes blindness? So we shouldn't look at the sky even? I've never heard blue being a danger other than its effect on the biological clock, so that seems like a pretty bold claim. Ultraviolet, sure... Though buried in there is something about immune system and vitamin E levels... I really find it hard to believe that blue light exposure is automatically bad. We have receptors for that specific purpose. Wearing blue light filtering sunglasses all the time as the article suggestions seems a bit ridiculous. Why give up one color entirely?
- astrodust 8y ago
  We have chemical receptors on our tongue and in our nose for poisons. We have neurons that detect pain. Just because we can sense it doesn't mean it's not harmful.
  - vosper 8y ago
    But those receptors signal something unpleasant - a terrible taste, pain. Looking at blue doesn't cause pain or unpleasantness.
    - xvector 8y ago
      I don't think your argument holds. Case in point: it is possible to make poison tasty.
    - dqpb 8y ago
      On the contrary in fact, I find gazing at the blue sky to be calming and enjoyable, and find it promotes diffuse thinking, which can greatly speed up problem solving.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        It's not about merely seeing something blue, like the sky, in a generally warm temperature ambient light. It's about blue color from screens.
heed 8y ago
I wear glasses with a blue light filter coating. I'm not sure how much this helps though. Anyone know?
hestipod 8y ago
This or something connected to it is literally ruining my last chance at life but I cannot solve it and there is always a catch. I was disabled long ago by bad surgery and left in lots of pain. My physical career was ended. I was denied social assistance and fell in every crack. Life has never been stable enough long enough to reeducate and rebuild. In suicidal desperation I posted in a few places asking for ideas. A few months back a very kind person reached out to me in response to one of my posts on social topics and offered me an opportunity, a once in a lifetime thing that can work around my issues. In the process of updating my equipment (I had been primarily using a 12yo TN/CCFL having laptop) I experienced severe eyestrain. That sent me down a path of "why" and months later I still have no answer. Eye doctor said I was ok and found nothing to explain this. I have monovision from Lasik done 20 years ago but it's never been an issue. I tested for and ruled out, to the best of my limited ability, the common gremlins like excesive blue light (always used f.lux/redshift before) and even tried the Uvex glasses that block ALL blue light. Tried PWM free displays and no change. Lowered brightness, changed ergonomics, font rendering, drivers, filters, OLED, ambient lighting. Anything common sense or the internet has come up with doesn't work for me. I even considered it was psychosomatic given the importance of me being able to do the one last thing I could do for any conceivable work and entertainment...sit at a computer...but no tactics to deal with that help. I was thinking about making an Ask HN thread recently but my last experience with that was pretty poor and the offer came from outside of that, but I saw this relevant post today and am desperate so here I am again. Other than some older, specific stuff like a MBP 2011 17" antiglare screen that I had to sell(panelook.com says it had an RGB backlight but some dispute that), an iPad 2 on iOS (for at least 30min anyway), and a Windows Phone Lumia 635 on Windows Phone 8.1, Any LED backlit display I look at, and ALL modern ones I have found, on any brightness, filter or setting, or OS causes tingling in my face, back of head, and neck which turns into strain/pain/headache. I can replicate it. I can soothe it with time away or using the old, half functional CCFL laptop. I have tried 8 different panels in a Thinkpad, everything Best Buy has, borrowed from people, wasted money buying on eBay and testing. No success or answers. There is a 10yo/168+ Apple support thread with no solution (was posted here not long ago in fact and most people blamed PWM or said it wasn't a big deal). A forum called ledstrain.org where people much smarter than me have tried to drill down through drivers and dithering and other options. Many of them reduce their quality of life further by using one of the 2 expensive and limited E-Ink displays out there, or hoard specific models of old displays and GPUs and outdated OS revisions they found work for them. I just cannot live even more limited like that since everything else about my life is already shrunk and reduced and miserable. Not being able to use or function around modern LED stuff is not tenable and there is no reasonable solution even on the horizon. Everything in my life is unstable and I have to solve this to get some foundation again. I am even entertaining the idea that this is all a big cosmic prank given how perfect the timing and specificity of this issue is. So, Loki, if you are out there I surrender. You win. Please give me a break.
mikeleeorg 8y ago
For the f.lux Mac users here, do you prefer that to Mac's Night Shift? I just found this article, which details why f.lux is better than Night Shift. But it's written by f.lux, so it's a bit biased. https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-new-competitive-macos-night-shift-feature-falls-short/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-ne... I'm guessing both are better than nothing, but is one actually better than the other?
- sbjs 8y ago
  I use Night Shift. I'm able to fall asleep minutes after closing my laptop and laying down. For me it's more about comfort than sleep. The blue light is much too bright late at night. My computer no longer hurts my eyes when I stay up late working on cool things.
- Eric_WVGG 8y ago
  I've been using F.lux for over seven years. Advantages… - You have a great deal of control over the blue level. Night Shift's blue level is higher than F.lux's default, and not adjustable. - Flux transitions more naturally as the sun goes down. - More scheduling options, "disable until tomorrow". - the big one: disabling per-app or for full-screen apps. You probably don't want Flux on while watching a movie or binging on a videogame. (I set up my lady friend with Night Shift and watched a movie with her recently, spent the whole film wondering why they made such awful color choices)
  - enos 8y ago
    - Night Shift is disabled for external displays. That's another killer one.
    - jamroom 8y ago
      I use Night Shift on my external 4K LG monitor no problem.
    - xvector 8y ago
      NightShift absolutely works on external displays
georgeam 8y ago
One solution I use is a 1/8" thick sheet of amber transparent rigid plastic/acrylic. It is designed to cut UV, but it also cuts blue light. I bought a 2'x4' sheet from an online site (since ads are probably not permitted, I will not mention the name of the company), and they cut it to size specifications for me. Out of that I got filters for my 14", 15" and 17" laptops, and a 30" LED TV. I find it easier on my eyes at night (both laptop and TV), and it has its place since the TV can't run f.lux and redshift.
- sp332 8y ago
  Recommendations of products are fine. Paid promotions or kickbacks are frowned on though.
upofadown 8y ago
Note that the lens of the eye yellows as you get older which significantly reduces the amount of blue light that reaches the retina. So much so that there is an idea floating around that older people don't get enough blue light to properly make the circadian stuff work and that teenagers get too much.
programUrJerb 8y ago
>Karunarathne introduced retinal molecules to other cell types in the body, such as cancer cells, heart cells and neurons. When exposed to blue light, these cell types died as a result of the combination with retinal. Blue light alone or retinal without blue light had no effect on cells. Does anyone disagree that this is equivalent to looking at a phone?
upofadown 8y ago
It is already known that you can damage retinal tissue with the light from blue LEDs. At a particular power density blue will be the more damaging colour as it has the highest energy. So the question is if the intensities and duration of exposure encountered in day to day life can cause permanent damage to the retina.
titzer 8y ago
Green on black terminals. I actually miss them! Just sayin'
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Amber. Amber on black.
zachrip 8y ago
I was recently diagnosed with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa (it basically just destroys your retinas). It's part of a larger condition called usher syndrome (which caused my severe hearing loss at birth). I'm on heavy doses of vitamin a palmitate as well as some other vitamins. Another thing that I haven't done yet but will be doing shortly is blue light blocking glasses, especially since I sit in front of a computer all day. I also use f.lux and night shift on windows and mac respectively. I'm 22 and have lost a significant portion of my night and peripheral vision so I'm still just trying to figure this all out. Any tips are welcome.
- gyc 8y ago
  I'm in my late 30s and was recently diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa too. I've started to use night shift/f.lux on my computers, and reading this article is also motivating me to update my glasses to one with blue light blocking.
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  My wife's brother has retinitis pigmentosa. He's 64 and has been blind for years. You definitely have my sympathies. I don't have any advice except to learn Braille, which I'm sure is not very encouraging. I hope a cure is found soon.
squarefoot 8y ago
I deeply hate blue leds, never liked them. As an electronics hobbyist I have been used for many years to the old red then green and yellow leds before the blue and later white ones came out, so I rushed out to buy some as soon as I could and while trying them I remember feeling uncomfortable staring at that light, to the point I never used them in anything: they're staying in their box for good. I already know about the blue light altering the circadian rhythm, but didn't back then, so it's possible the brain was sending a message there was something wrong with that light.
fpgaminer 8y ago
Lots of comments here about blue-less lighting at night, so I thought I'd share my experiences in trying to warm-ify our household lighting. I'm in no way an expert; just sharing some experience. It all started when we moved in to our current place. The previous tenants had left a bunch of old incandescent bulbs. I guess I had forgotten in the past two decades just how warm colored those lights are. It is a really comforting color temperature and great for getting sleepy before bedtime. Of course when I went to replace them with LEDs the contrast was obvious. Now enlightened (heh) to the differences I went on a quest for warm colored LEDs. Turns out, that's really difficult. First I bought just any old light with the word "warm". But most LEDs you find are actually "warm white" or "soft white". Basically 2700K and up. Whereas old school incan. is ~2400K. The difference is huge and I was very disappointed. So I began to filter my searches looking for things in the 2400K range. The local lighting store had _nothing_ (a store completely dedicated to selling lights). Amazon had a few options, but not many. Once you filter by low temperature and dimmable you begin to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Most were off-brand, which I try to avoid since poor quality LEDs will fail early when their cheap power supplies burn out. I went through a few rounds of orders but finally settled on a set of Philips dimmable A15 lights "with warm glow effect". They are small enough to fit in all fixtures I've run into for those kinds of bulbs. But the best feature is that they change temperature as you dim them. So you have the option of a cooler "soft white" (2700K) at full brightness, or all the way down to 2200K when dimmed! To a non-expert in lighting they subjectively looked the best and gave us the same warm, comforting glow we were looking for at night. So my advice, if you're looking to upgrade your house to warm bulbs, make sure to look for something 2400K or less. Others have mentioned checking CRI, and that's important. I don't know the CRI on the bulbs I got. Again, they subjectively looked the best. But there aren't a lot of options in the truly warm color range so it's a feature I had to not care much about. I also found some really great vintage filament style LED bulbs for a project (vintage style outdoor string lights with corded wiring; built from scratch). They're from a company I found on Amazon called Cmyk. Off brand, but they're the best option I found in that category and their packaging was actually really professional. They are labelled as 2200K, but they look even warmer than that. When dimmed about half way you get just the right amount of glow that you can see the faux-filaments. Super happy with those. Beyond that you can also just get color-changing bulbs like Philips Hue. Since all this went down I've been slowly upgrading to those instead. That gives you the option to choose really any temperature you want at any point. I'm not sure how the "quality" of light from that setup compares to a real warm LED lightbulb. Obviously you're getting a "warm" color by mixing red and green LEDs so it isn't a true color temperature. But on the other hand you're definitely not getting blue light, which is the important thing. Either way, subjectively they look great and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (Usual caveats about buying into a somewhat closed system applies; Philips Hues are sort of the best worst option today.)
onnnon 8y ago
I wear computer glasses at all times when working, and highly recommend them. It greatly reduces eye strain, and filters blue light. If anyone is looking for a good pair, I buy mine from Gunnar [0] (no affiliation). [0] https://gunnar.com/ https://gunnar.com/
- holtalanm 8y ago
  if you need prescription versions, you can get them at LensCrafters: https://www.lenscrafters.com/lc-us/blueiq-lenses https://www.lenscrafters.com/lc-us/blueiq-lenses I use those and they work wonders.
- hestipod 8y ago
  Tried these and some Uvex glasses that block 100% of blue light (Gunnars are very low % blocking relatively). Zero impact on my strain. I have seen many others state the same. It's obv there are many causes for strain, just wish I could figure mine out.
- splittingTimes 8y ago
  what about EagleEyes? Does anybody have experience with these? Blue light blocking: https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/blue-light-blocking https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/blue-light-blocking Computer sunglasses https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/digital-eye-protection https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/digital-eye-protection
herf 8y ago
f.lux author here, still slogging through the article. It is hard to understand the light levels used because they use "power" (uW, mW) from a laser, and not "irradiance" (uW/cm^2 or mW/cm^2), so which area they have concentrated that light over is hard to understand. All I can see is it is from a laser, so the irradiance could be extremely high. The human lens filters most light at the peak of the given spectrum for free retinal (383nm), and so once you get to 450nm like an LED, the hazard data in the visual range is 100x less sensitive, see Fig 1 here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2011.00921.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097.... It bears repeating that computer screens have <5% the hazard-weighted irradiance of a blue sky. (Can't make a direct comparison with lasers.) Not sure the conversion to white light is correct, and it is unclear to me right now if this much retinal is available in vivo.
- Forge36 8y ago
  I'm running f.lux on my work PC (tones down a bad otherwise VERY bright-blue monitor). Thank you for reading/writing out your interpretation of the article so clearly (highlighting points others are likely to trip on not coming from a related background)
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Have we fixed the “optimized for electronics store demo” problem with monitors yet? Part of my ritual of setting up a new monitor is to turn down the brightness and increase the contrast. They almost always default to very bad values. Brightness, temperature and green/blur balance are all off for an office setting. In the worst case the backlight was capable of outputting twice as much light as I really needed.
    - LeoPanthera 8y ago
      Most/all modern monitors have presets, one of which is "store demo". All you've got to do is pick the calibrated preset.
    - userbinator 8y ago
pmoriarty 8y ago
"The researcher found that a molecule called alpha tocoferol, a Vitamin E derivative and a natural antioxidant in the eye and body, stops the cells from dying. However, as a person ages or the immune system is suppressed, people lose the ability to fight against the attack by retinal and blue light." Does this mean that consuming alpha tocoferol can combat the toxic effect of blue light? If so, at what dosage?
polskibus 8y ago
So LED bulbs would be even worse, right? Is it time to go back to incandescent bulb?
chroem- 8y ago
It's more than a little amusing to see this at the top of HN only a few days after getting attacked for posting my personal experience with blue light and retinal degeneration.
- alain_gilbert 8y ago
  You should post the link. It could be fun to compare the comments !
  - drivers99 8y ago
    chroem-'s comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720 Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316
nathan_long 8y ago
I am excited about LED lights for their efficiency, but keep seeing articles like this and don't understand the practical ramifications, like "what bulbs should I buy?" I messaged Cree on Twitter, expecting a very corporate response, but they linked to some studies (which I haven't yet had time to explore.) FWIW - https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue-light-and-light-night https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue-light-a... and https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=378#.WjLMBFWnGM9 https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=3... were the resources they suggested.
- herf 8y ago
  The message is: there is no more risk from LED than older sources, by the metrics we have now. I would suggest that one problem is that LEDs don't "warm dim" (unless you get some special ones from Philips and a few others), and people tend to dim them less overall.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    What do you mean by "warm dim"?
    - herf 8y ago
      An incandescent/halogen will go to warmer temperatures when dimmed. So it might start at 2800-3000K but be 2100-2200K at 1% brightness.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Perhaps you could look into buying red lampshades. The direct illumination of the LED would still be rather blue but the light passing through the shade would not.
dewiz 8y ago
Now I’m wondering about the damage of all those Windows crashes and blue screens :-) Seriously though, the sky is blue, the sea is blue, how come we’ve evolved into beings affected by blue light??
- perilunar 8y ago
  Yeah, but they're only blue during the day!
- vladus2000 8y ago
  This is affecting people in their 50s+, a lot of our evolution people had and raised offspring before this occurred so there was no evolutionary pressure to keep your vision much past that. It was good enough.
ChikkaChiChi 8y ago
Don't want any blue light from your devices at night? - AMOLED Android device with a custom kernel that supports color profiles set to fire only the red pixels. - Get transparent red film from Amazon and cover your Kindle screen. - Wear orange safety glasses at night to dramatically reduce all blue light. - Bonus difficulty: Wear red laser goggles. Do not attempt to drive!
paulkon 8y ago
https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen I've been using it for some time now. By default I look at my phone, tablet and computer monitor in inverted mode. Video content is watched as normal. Makes it way easier to get work done and keep the eye strain to a minimum.
georgewsinger 8y ago
Implications for VR?
lechiffre10 8y ago
On a similar note, has anyone heard of Felix Gray? I've been thinking of getting a pair of lenses from them. They make lenses that filter blue light and they happen to look pretty good too.
exegete 8y ago
Do we know why bankers chose green instead of yellow for their eye shades? I know they wore them due to eye strain, but why green and not something else?
HIPisTheAnswer 8y ago
This is a huge problem. Neon light everywhere. I go out at night with sunglasses. The world is littered with light polluting salvages. That and combustion engines. I used to drive one. I used to behave criminally too. Light, sound, air pollution are real crimes. The world is littered with criminal brutes; anyone who uses bright neons, churns a combustion engine, or plays the stereo loudly. Soon the little people will be angry at the 'rich bastards who burn gas with their machines or waste power on overly bright aggressive lights'. Average person will then only afford a handful of KWh per month, and my life will be better. I wont stop any crowd from hanging gas/naphta burners or smashing neons tubes.
beams_of_light 8y ago
I wish I had never been privy to this information. All it's going to do is make me paranoid about yet another thing in life.
davidcyp 8y ago
google "blue light mrsa" Blue light kills cells. It's used in hospitals to kill germs and also use to treat acne. Hand dryers also use them. I'm not surprised it kills certain human cells as well.
ScottBurson 8y ago
Really surprised there's no discussion here about the ubiquitousness of black-on-bright-white color schemes in apps (including this text box I'm typing into right now, though for the most part, HN uses a soft beige tint for its background; but it's still dark-on-light). It's really quite unnecessary. For code editing I have a light-on-dark Emacs color scheme, which is much easier on the eyes. Yes, Macs have a setting to invert the color palette, but that's not useful to me — a lot of my windows are dark; I don't want them inverted, and it makes images unintelligible. What I really want is something that doesn't screw with images, but detects dark-on-light text and maps the colors in such a way as to preserve contrast and even hue.
- asadkn 8y ago
  For many of us with astigmatism, the trend to default to dark schemes would be quite troubling. They're painfully uncomfortable irrelevant of contrast. There's fuzzing and "halation". It took me a long time to figure out the why. I love dark layouts in terms of aesthetics, but I cannot use them. Without being biased, from what I have read so far, the research seems favorable for dark-on-light as long as proper room lighting is achieved and monitor brightness and contrast is adjusted for it. In poor light conditions, the inverse seems to be true. While there's a reason for current defaults, everything should be optimized for and have options for both black and dark schemes.
  - ScottBurson 8y ago
    Fair enough; I don't mind other people using whatever they prefer, as long as I have an option for light-on-dark. I wonder, though, what the real problem is that you have with dark themes. It could be related to the combination of wide-gamut monitor blacklights and high-index plastic eyeglass lenses. I wrote something about this here: http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and-eyeglass-lenses.html http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and...
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    I'm curious to why it's a problem. I have a astigmatism, but with glasses I have better than 20/20 vision and have zero issue with light-on-dark. Without glasses light-on-dark and dark-on-light alike are a problem to read.
foo101 8y ago
What would be the right daytime setting in f.lux to reduce the harmful effects of blue light? The default daytime setting under recommended colors in f.lux is 6500K. I tend to use a daytime setting of 5500K. Is 5500K good enough to reduce the harmful effects of blue light or do I need to go even lower?
oblib 8y ago
I bought a monitor a couple years ago that has a "Low Blue Light" feature you can turn on/off. At first I didn't like it. It kind of dulls the screen down and makes things look greener. But after using it for a couple months, along with a couple other monitors on my desk, my eyes were getting tired so I turned the feature on and used it for a few days to see if I could get used to it. When I switched it back off afterwards I was pretty shocked at how much more my eyes were instantly stressed. I turned it back on and have left it on since. I also turned the blue down on my other two monitors. And I can feel the difference when I set them back to their defaults too. I don't think I'd like it for TV, though I might get used to it as well, but for coding and surfing the web it works for me.
foolrush 8y ago
One would have thought that the thousands upon thousands of hours of daylight exposure would have already made us all blind if this was actually solid research.
linuxyz 8y ago
For this exact reason, I've bought a e-ink 13.3" monitor from here https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e-ink-monitor-save-your-eyes-iphone-computers#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e-ink... It's not cheap because it is the only one on the market. Apparently, constructors don't care about this future big health hazard...
sunseb 8y ago
So I have switched my coding theme from "Cobalt" to "Solarized Light"
wodenokoto 8y ago
I don't know if this is a stupid question, but if I set my LED lightbulb to warm-light, or set my OLED phone to blue light filter / warm light, am I still exposing myself to this dangerous blue light?
peterclary 8y ago
Something to consider for VR headset manufacturers and VR software developers? Pumping bright blue light into the eye at close range seems like the worst case.

851 points by maxwell 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Submitted title was "Blue light is toxic to human eyes". That broke the site guidelines, which ask you to "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kjullien 8y ago

Did we not already know about this ? I remember 5+ years ago blue LEDs were pulled off of the market (at least in France) because the spectrum they emit in is way too close to uv and could burn your macula.

kypro 8y ago
Wait, is UV light bad for your eyes? Should I be careful about visiting bars with UV light too?
- kjullien 8y ago
  Yes, UV rays cause damage to pretty much any organic matter, that's the reason we wear sunscreen, sunglasses, and why cheap "fake" sunglasses can be harmful for your eyes (the glass is simply tinted and does not filter out the UVs, which is what they should be doing) edit: the way I remember it is that like any type of radiation, anything that goes into your body stays there pretty much until your death, the only way to keep your "uv capital" in good shape is to be proactive about it, cant do anything retroactively. This is why about 1/3rd of Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime.
  - gomox 8y ago
    I just wanted to point out that most cheap (and therefore plastic) sunglasses are actually perfectly fine in terms of UV protection. Polycarbonate is UV opaque. If you Google this subject there are several websites where people went out and bought cheap an expensive sunglasses and had them tested and reached the same conclusion: UV protection does not justify expensive Raybans.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- MisterTea 8y ago
  Supposedly the intensity of a "black light", the UV emitting lamps found in clubs/bars/amusement attractions/etc are below the harmful threshold. I have never been comfortable in their presence as my eyes begin to fatigue and I experience discomfort. YMMV.
- avgDev 8y ago
  Black lights used in clubs generally don't have enough power to cause eye damage or sun burn, therefore, I would not be too concerned. Lights used in something like a tanning bed, can obviously burn your skin and also damage your eyes that is why people should wear eye protection, or do the healthy thing and not tan at all.
- btrettel 8y ago
  When I did research as an undergraduate, one of the MS students in the lab I was working in moved a powerful UV light used to cure glues from the corner of the room to the center and used it without putting a box over it as was standard procedure. Of course, he didn't look at the light himself, but he also didn't announce its use either. I saw the UV light as I was walking through the lab. It was basically a bright purple/blue light. Several hours later I was effectively blind due to pain, which continued for a few days. I basically had the equivalent of a bad sunburn on my eyes. This was one of several reasons I quit that lab. Since then I've avoided academic labs that have UV lights or lasers because I don't trust that the students follow safety procedures at all.

b_b 8y ago

For many of us whose use of these blue-light emitting computer and phone screens is necessary, what can we do about it?

goda90 8y ago
Well at least a start is to use software like f.lux that reduces the blue levels on the screen. There are also over screen filters and yellow tinted glasses that can filter the blue light.
- pishpash 8y ago
  It sounds like one should use it permanently, and not just at night. But the real problem is the spectral composition of the synthetic white light on screens. Now I want fluorescent backlights back.
  - bcoates 8y ago
    Is there any reason to think that narrowband blue is worse than broadband blue? It makes for poor CRI when used as a light source but if the display blue is near the peak sensitivity frequency for blue it should result in slightly less total power being delivered to the eye than an equivalent blackbody spectrum white light.
    - pishpash 8y ago
      Maybe total power isn't what matters and peak sensitivity is also where peak damage is.
kjullien 8y ago
Use f.lux or an equivalent (most OS have their own implementation by now) that filters out the blue light at software/rendering level, it's not perfect but you do instantly feel the comfort it brings to your eyes. Been using f.lux for over 10 years and it also helps alot with going to sleep at night. When it's off your eyes/brain thinks that they are in daytime / broad daylight, when it's on I fall asleep 2 or 3 times faster than without.

pishpash 8y ago

I definitely feel I've been going blind, more than I should with age.

DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago

Here’s the actual study, thanks to sci-hub: http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0/ratnayake2018.pdf http://twin.sci-hub.tw/6979/4112e16f7195f7f33cd3e861c6345df0...

superkuh 8y ago
The post's URL actually includes links to the sci rep paper and the full text pdf paper is available from there for free for everyone. No sci-hub needed. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8 http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8 http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8.pdf

sandGorgon 8y ago

Fedora/Gnome has had "Night Light" built into the OS by default. Big difference to eye strain with it !

Razengan 8y ago
iOS, macOS and Windows as well.
pishpash 8y ago
This is not a permanent solution because simply shifting the color temperature has the side effect of generating melatonin and disrupting your circadian clock. You really need a daylight white spectrum and not concentrate all the blue-green energy in one blue spike.

corpMaverick 8y ago

From the article... To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light outside and avoid looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark." Please share any additional actionable advice.

cheschire 8y ago
Set your monitor to R=49, G=34, B=19
lawlessone 8y ago
Wear Sunscreen Start a pension.
- downrightmike 8y ago
  Go back in time and plant a tree.

rgrove 8y ago

> To protect your eyes from blue light, Karunarathne advises to [...] avoid looking at your cell phones or tablets in the dark. Can someone explain why it would be worse to look at a cell phone in the dark? It's emitting the same blue light (or less, if the display gets dimmer) as it is in a bright environment. Why is that light more harmful in a dark environment?

CapitalistCartr 8y ago
Your pupils are dilated; you're receiving more light.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lawlessone 8y ago
I'm not a doctor but in a dark environment your pupils would be less constricted. From what i heard this is also why sunglasses that don't block UV light are worse than not having sunglasses at all.
colanderman 8y ago
Your pupils are more dilated, due to the surrounding darkness, and hence let more light in. If you were to dim your screen enough to compensate, it would likely be too dark to read.
kjullien 8y ago
Because of the way your eyes work. If it is bright, your pupil will be shrunk, to not be blinded by the luminosity. When it is dark, your pupil will be opened wide up. It is this principle that camera apertures are based on. Now if you have your pupil wide open in a completely dark environment and put a 100% brightness screen at ~10cm of your eyes, what do you expect will happen ? Our eyes are made for nature, that means day and night, now we have technology that is akin to a handheld sun and you use this at night at 10cm of your face, our eyes are simply not equipped to handle this.

friedman23 8y ago

I use f.lux all day I don't know if I'm particularly sensitive or if it's all in my head but when I turn off f.lux, especially at night, to watch some movie or video I can physically feel my pupils dilate and it almost feels like my eyes go from being at rest to being strained.

xur17 8y ago
I use something similar to flux for my lightbulbs, and I've noticed the same thing when I disable it at night. My eyes are definitely strained.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Care to link what you're using? It would be nice to modify my room to use changing color spectrum bulbs depending on the time of day.
  - xur17 8y ago
    I'm using this [0] Home Assistant component. I also use a similar component to slowly turn my lights on in the morning instead of an alarm clock, which works really well. [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/components/switch.flux/ https://www.home-assistant.io/components/switch.flux/
degenerate 8y ago
Same - I have flux setup to be active during work hours (at work) and evening hours (at home) so it's filtering blue light on all my devices. When I accidentally close it or turn it off for a movie, I feel like a vampire in sunlight. I have such an easier time falling asleep thanks to flux.
danaos 8y ago
As a linux user, I have found that Redshift works better than f.lux. It's the first thing that I install on a new machine of mine.
- 8y ago

arprocter 8y ago

I wonder if the brightness settings have any bearing on this? If I don't dial mine way down it's very uncomfortable

lukewrites 8y ago

Can anyone recommend editor color schemes that look good when f.lux is set to heavily filter blue light?

ninkendo 8y ago
I’ve really started to like gruvbox lately. It’s naturally a warm color theme already so I would imagine it should still look good under a heavy blue light filter.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

Can someone say if it is harmful to use a blue light filtering software 24/7? I get its use at night, but would using it from sun up to sun down cause any problems?

graeme 8y ago
Only if you never went outside. Otherwise, it shouldn't. Blue light emitting screens are recent, if blue light is off, it's still more light than a book. But never going outside would mess with circadian rhythm.

gregcrv 8y ago

"to wear sunglasses that can filter both UV and blue light" But isn't this bad with other consequences? I thought the lack of blue/violet light was the cause of myopia? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5233810/

ectospheno 8y ago
VSP basically owns TechShield Blue. Other manufacturers have competing products but they are all pretty horrible. The cynic in me wonders if the researchers have any ties to VSP.
derefr 8y ago
You can't develop myopia or hyperopia after your eyes/skull/orbital muscles are done growing. So this suggestion probably applies only to adults. Keep in mind that this is age-related macular degeneration. Your photoreceptor cells are protected by the α-tocopherol until "a person's 50s or 60s." You wouldn't need any prophylactic interventions until then.
- niceperson 8y ago
  >You can't develop myopia or hyperopia after your eyes/skull/orbital muscles are done growing. Do you have a source for that? Would the inverse also be true?
  - derefr 8y ago
    I don't know about a source—a medical textbook? Those conditions are explicitly caused by the eye being squished out of the "proper" shape for focusing light by the way the skull and extraocular muscles end up developing. I suppose you could develop myopia later in life as a result of inflammation of the extraocular muscles (orbital myositis), but this would be 1. temporary, and 2. not treated as its own disease, but rather as a symptom.
- graeme 8y ago
  Interesting. My myopia worsened a bit from ages 22-27 or so. Does that mean my skull and muscles were changing still?

gumby 8y ago

Many of the comments here are about displays, but what about the LEDs sold as replacement for incandescent and halogen bulbs?

Eochei5h 8y ago
Check the spec sheet of the bulbs, specifically the color temperature in kelvin. Ignore the "warm white" and similar marketing terms, they are too fuzzy. A LED with low color temperature and high CRI should have pretty much the same spectrum as incandescent. If you want really low temperatures look for some retro filament style LED lights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing_different_lighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature#Categorizing...
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  CRI unfortunately is not a good test, it still can produce very high ratings even when the spectrum is spiky.
  - namibj 8y ago
    95+CRI is an indicator for mostly lack of spikes. Look at Yuji (yujiintl.com), they seem to be the only ones selling actual high-CRI LEDs with sane pricing (i.e., no ideological markup).
    - mapmap 8y ago
      I'd like to try one of these out, but at $20 per bulb it's a a bit steep. Are you able to comment how they compare to the Feit Electric 90+ CRI bulbs sold at Costco for a few dollars a bulb?
- pistachiopro 8y ago
  It's tricky, though, since most LED bulbs use a single wavelength of blue LEDs which get downshifted by phosphors, even in high CRI bulbs, you can have an unnaturally large spike in the blue (often around 450nm).

mafuyu 8y ago

I'm in the process of building a Philips Hue-compatible light therapy LED strip that goes above my bed, and I chose 500 nm cyan LEDs due to this concern. The goal is to have the lights gradually wake me up every morning and help align my sleep cycles, as I suffer from Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder. Figure 3[0] in the paper seems to show that 500 nm is safe, and that melanopsin has high absorption at 500nm, which has important effects on circadian rhythm[1]. Anyone more knowledgable than me know if this setup is safe? [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28254-8/figures/3 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadian_rhythm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin#Effects_on_circadia...

priccis 8y ago
I'm sorry I can't help you, but after reading an article posted here about melatonin I got interested in light therapy, but commercial devices are a bit expensive. Are you documenting your project?
- mafuyu 8y ago
  Sure, it's not the most exciting project, but I might do a short writeup when I'm done. I originally purchased these nice LED strip bars with enclosure in blue[0], but after reading this site by the manufacturers of a commercial green therapy light[1], I was convinced to switch to turquoise/cyan. Turquoise isn't that popular so I wasn't able to find any strips/bars, and I got these individual 3W bead LED modules instead.[2] For the Hue integration, I'm using a Mesh Bee + UartSBee v5[3] with firmware from PeeVeeOne[4]. It outputs PWM, and I'm hooking it up to a cheapo constant current LED driver I got from Aliexpress. Since all the LEDs need to be in series for a constant current driver, I'm probably looking at a ~20V power supply to power the whole thing. My bedframe has a headboard, so I'm planning on 3D printing some mounts that clamp on top. [0]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/50CM-U-Aluminium-shell-DC-12V-36-SMD-5630-LED-Hard-Rigid-LED-Strip-Bar/332644356624 https://www.ebay.com/itm/50CM-U-Aluminium-shell-DC-12V-36-SM... [1]: http://www.sunnexbiotech.com/blue%20vs%20green%20light.html http://www.sunnexbiotech.com/blue%20vs%20green%20light.html [2]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-pcs-3W-Turquoise-Cyan-LEDs-Diode-Beads-Lamp-Chip-Emitter-700ma-3Watt-Chip-type-500nm/32812975950.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-pcs-3W-Turquoise-Cyan-LED... [3a]: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Mesh-Bee-Open-Source-Zigbee-Pro-Module-with-MCU-(JN5168)-p-1751.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/Mesh-Bee-Open-Source-Zigbee-Pro-... [3b]: https://www.seeedstudio.com/UartSBee-V5-p-1752.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/UartSBee-V5-p-1752.html [4]: https://peeveeone.com/?page_id=252 https://peeveeone.com/?page_id=252

JohnBerea 8y ago

In addition to f.lux, I also use the Dark Reader Chrome extension[1], which dynamically generates dark themes for every page you visit. It seems to make a bigger difference than using f.lux. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

adtac 8y ago
How does the amount of blue light we see from our computers and mobile devices compare to the blue light seen from the rest of the world quantitatively? While I agree that f.lux helps in the night, I'd guess that the impact caused by f.lux to prevent the effect mentioned in the article is pretty minimal. (Obviously, I have no citations or references; just a wild guess.)
verta 8y ago
Def'ly a great relief for my eye strain - using it during the day too and keeping on by default. One annoyance is that Chrome needs to let the address bar be darkened as well as it stands out like a neon tube when Dark Reader is on.
- m_ke 8y ago
  I just use a dark chrome theme with it to get around that issue.
kakuri 8y ago
Thanks for sharing! I did not know about this. I use Stylus and dark themes for many sites, but this will be great for random sites. https://add0n.com/stylus.html https://add0n.com/stylus.html
eggie 8y ago
Using this on an OLED screen really makes it clear that the current standard of light backgrounds and dark text is only optimal with backlit LCD panels.

DavideNL 8y ago

Is this the same blue light as emitted by for example the Philips light therapy lamps? https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu-energy-light https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3429_60/golite-blu-energy-...

jefe_ 8y ago
I use one of these every day, found two things, one from Philips in 2011 with some PDF documents, making claims the light is safe: http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&dct=QAD&faqview=1&refdisplay=EN_DETAILS_BLUELIGHT%20DANGER_NO&refnr=0074803&scy=US&slg=AEN http://www.p4c.philips.com/cgi-bin/cpindex.pl?ctn=HF3332/60&... 2011 was a while ago, this Stack Exchange post from 2013 seems to indicate there is a possibility for macular degeneration with use of these devices, particularly if you are already at risk for the condition: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can-blue-light-therapy-contribute-to-age-related-macular-degeneration https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13891/can-blue-... Some googling seems to indicate there were rumors of these lights potentially causing issues, and it sounds like the Chemist article may be presenting a scientific basis for that speculation. Turned off my light for now.

codemac 8y ago

Anyone have suggestions for kindles? A lot of the "screens" I've seen on amazon have pretty terrible reviews. It's the one major source of nighttime blue light that I consume. I've largely given up using my phone / laptop in the dark, as I decided I'm an adult and can just leave the lights on. Reading in bed is one of my favorite things, and it bothers my partner to leave the lights on.

graeme 8y ago
What about a red light in a lamp? I use a red light to read at night. Doesn't bother my girlfriend (though she's not hugely bothered by light in general) Combine that with an e ink non backlit kindle and you'll have no blue light.
scns 8y ago
Yellow glasses block blue light
smileysteve 8y ago
The contrast of just your screen and focusing in the dark is likely damaging on its own; but you can add the red filter, and, if using kindle app, make the font white on black background. But yes, as Kindles imply, reading text printed without a backlight is preferable to backlit text, so prefer lights over the backlight.

fierybanana 8y ago

This might be relevant: https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light-and-the-retina https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/2446/blue-light-and-the-...

onecooldev24 8y ago

I use flu.x app on my mac. Is something like this going to help if you end up on your laptop for the most part of your day.

graeme 8y ago

What about morning wakeup lights? I have one that's daylight spectrum with 93 CRI. Is this generally ok, or harmful?

JimboOmega 8y ago

I don't quite understand. Blue light - any blue light - causes blindness? So we shouldn't look at the sky even? I've never heard blue being a danger other than its effect on the biological clock, so that seems like a pretty bold claim. Ultraviolet, sure... Though buried in there is something about immune system and vitamin E levels... I really find it hard to believe that blue light exposure is automatically bad. We have receptors for that specific purpose. Wearing blue light filtering sunglasses all the time as the article suggestions seems a bit ridiculous. Why give up one color entirely?

astrodust 8y ago
We have chemical receptors on our tongue and in our nose for poisons. We have neurons that detect pain. Just because we can sense it doesn't mean it's not harmful.
- vosper 8y ago
  But those receptors signal something unpleasant - a terrible taste, pain. Looking at blue doesn't cause pain or unpleasantness.
  - xvector 8y ago
    I don't think your argument holds. Case in point: it is possible to make poison tasty.
  - dqpb 8y ago
    On the contrary in fact, I find gazing at the blue sky to be calming and enjoyable, and find it promotes diffuse thinking, which can greatly speed up problem solving.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      It's not about merely seeing something blue, like the sky, in a generally warm temperature ambient light. It's about blue color from screens.

heed 8y ago

I wear glasses with a blue light filter coating. I'm not sure how much this helps though. Anyone know?

hestipod 8y ago

This or something connected to it is literally ruining my last chance at life but I cannot solve it and there is always a catch. I was disabled long ago by bad surgery and left in lots of pain. My physical career was ended. I was denied social assistance and fell in every crack. Life has never been stable enough long enough to reeducate and rebuild. In suicidal desperation I posted in a few places asking for ideas. A few months back a very kind person reached out to me in response to one of my posts on social topics and offered me an opportunity, a once in a lifetime thing that can work around my issues. In the process of updating my equipment (I had been primarily using a 12yo TN/CCFL having laptop) I experienced severe eyestrain. That sent me down a path of "why" and months later I still have no answer. Eye doctor said I was ok and found nothing to explain this. I have monovision from Lasik done 20 years ago but it's never been an issue. I tested for and ruled out, to the best of my limited ability, the common gremlins like excesive blue light (always used f.lux/redshift before) and even tried the Uvex glasses that block ALL blue light. Tried PWM free displays and no change. Lowered brightness, changed ergonomics, font rendering, drivers, filters, OLED, ambient lighting. Anything common sense or the internet has come up with doesn't work for me. I even considered it was psychosomatic given the importance of me being able to do the one last thing I could do for any conceivable work and entertainment...sit at a computer...but no tactics to deal with that help. I was thinking about making an Ask HN thread recently but my last experience with that was pretty poor and the offer came from outside of that, but I saw this relevant post today and am desperate so here I am again. Other than some older, specific stuff like a MBP 2011 17" antiglare screen that I had to sell(panelook.com says it had an RGB backlight but some dispute that), an iPad 2 on iOS (for at least 30min anyway), and a Windows Phone Lumia 635 on Windows Phone 8.1, Any LED backlit display I look at, and ALL modern ones I have found, on any brightness, filter or setting, or OS causes tingling in my face, back of head, and neck which turns into strain/pain/headache. I can replicate it. I can soothe it with time away or using the old, half functional CCFL laptop. I have tried 8 different panels in a Thinkpad, everything Best Buy has, borrowed from people, wasted money buying on eBay and testing. No success or answers. There is a 10yo/168+ Apple support thread with no solution (was posted here not long ago in fact and most people blamed PWM or said it wasn't a big deal). A forum called ledstrain.org where people much smarter than me have tried to drill down through drivers and dithering and other options. Many of them reduce their quality of life further by using one of the 2 expensive and limited E-Ink displays out there, or hoard specific models of old displays and GPUs and outdated OS revisions they found work for them. I just cannot live even more limited like that since everything else about my life is already shrunk and reduced and miserable. Not being able to use or function around modern LED stuff is not tenable and there is no reasonable solution even on the horizon. Everything in my life is unstable and I have to solve this to get some foundation again. I am even entertaining the idea that this is all a big cosmic prank given how perfect the timing and specificity of this issue is. So, Loki, if you are out there I surrender. You win. Please give me a break.

mikeleeorg 8y ago

For the f.lux Mac users here, do you prefer that to Mac's Night Shift? I just found this article, which details why f.lux is better than Night Shift. But it's written by f.lux, so it's a bit biased. https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-new-competitive-macos-night-shift-feature-falls-short/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/28/flux-developer-says-apples-ne... I'm guessing both are better than nothing, but is one actually better than the other?

sbjs 8y ago
I use Night Shift. I'm able to fall asleep minutes after closing my laptop and laying down. For me it's more about comfort than sleep. The blue light is much too bright late at night. My computer no longer hurts my eyes when I stay up late working on cool things.
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
I've been using F.lux for over seven years. Advantages… - You have a great deal of control over the blue level. Night Shift's blue level is higher than F.lux's default, and not adjustable. - Flux transitions more naturally as the sun goes down. - More scheduling options, "disable until tomorrow". - the big one: disabling per-app or for full-screen apps. You probably don't want Flux on while watching a movie or binging on a videogame. (I set up my lady friend with Night Shift and watched a movie with her recently, spent the whole film wondering why they made such awful color choices)
- enos 8y ago
  - Night Shift is disabled for external displays. That's another killer one.
  - jamroom 8y ago
    I use Night Shift on my external 4K LG monitor no problem.
  - xvector 8y ago
    NightShift absolutely works on external displays

georgeam 8y ago

One solution I use is a 1/8" thick sheet of amber transparent rigid plastic/acrylic. It is designed to cut UV, but it also cuts blue light. I bought a 2'x4' sheet from an online site (since ads are probably not permitted, I will not mention the name of the company), and they cut it to size specifications for me. Out of that I got filters for my 14", 15" and 17" laptops, and a 30" LED TV. I find it easier on my eyes at night (both laptop and TV), and it has its place since the TV can't run f.lux and redshift.

sp332 8y ago
Recommendations of products are fine. Paid promotions or kickbacks are frowned on though.

upofadown 8y ago

Note that the lens of the eye yellows as you get older which significantly reduces the amount of blue light that reaches the retina. So much so that there is an idea floating around that older people don't get enough blue light to properly make the circadian stuff work and that teenagers get too much.

programUrJerb 8y ago

>Karunarathne introduced retinal molecules to other cell types in the body, such as cancer cells, heart cells and neurons. When exposed to blue light, these cell types died as a result of the combination with retinal. Blue light alone or retinal without blue light had no effect on cells. Does anyone disagree that this is equivalent to looking at a phone?

upofadown 8y ago

It is already known that you can damage retinal tissue with the light from blue LEDs. At a particular power density blue will be the more damaging colour as it has the highest energy. So the question is if the intensities and duration of exposure encountered in day to day life can cause permanent damage to the retina.

titzer 8y ago

Green on black terminals. I actually miss them! Just sayin'

bradknowles 8y ago
Amber. Amber on black.

zachrip 8y ago

I was recently diagnosed with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa (it basically just destroys your retinas). It's part of a larger condition called usher syndrome (which caused my severe hearing loss at birth). I'm on heavy doses of vitamin a palmitate as well as some other vitamins. Another thing that I haven't done yet but will be doing shortly is blue light blocking glasses, especially since I sit in front of a computer all day. I also use f.lux and night shift on windows and mac respectively. I'm 22 and have lost a significant portion of my night and peripheral vision so I'm still just trying to figure this all out. Any tips are welcome.

gyc 8y ago
I'm in my late 30s and was recently diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa too. I've started to use night shift/f.lux on my computers, and reading this article is also motivating me to update my glasses to one with blue light blocking.
ScottBurson 8y ago
My wife's brother has retinitis pigmentosa. He's 64 and has been blind for years. You definitely have my sympathies. I don't have any advice except to learn Braille, which I'm sure is not very encouraging. I hope a cure is found soon.

squarefoot 8y ago

I deeply hate blue leds, never liked them. As an electronics hobbyist I have been used for many years to the old red then green and yellow leds before the blue and later white ones came out, so I rushed out to buy some as soon as I could and while trying them I remember feeling uncomfortable staring at that light, to the point I never used them in anything: they're staying in their box for good. I already know about the blue light altering the circadian rhythm, but didn't back then, so it's possible the brain was sending a message there was something wrong with that light.

fpgaminer 8y ago

Lots of comments here about blue-less lighting at night, so I thought I'd share my experiences in trying to warm-ify our household lighting. I'm in no way an expert; just sharing some experience. It all started when we moved in to our current place. The previous tenants had left a bunch of old incandescent bulbs. I guess I had forgotten in the past two decades just how warm colored those lights are. It is a really comforting color temperature and great for getting sleepy before bedtime. Of course when I went to replace them with LEDs the contrast was obvious. Now enlightened (heh) to the differences I went on a quest for warm colored LEDs. Turns out, that's really difficult. First I bought just any old light with the word "warm". But most LEDs you find are actually "warm white" or "soft white". Basically 2700K and up. Whereas old school incan. is ~2400K. The difference is huge and I was very disappointed. So I began to filter my searches looking for things in the 2400K range. The local lighting store had _nothing_ (a store completely dedicated to selling lights). Amazon had a few options, but not many. Once you filter by low temperature and dimmable you begin to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Most were off-brand, which I try to avoid since poor quality LEDs will fail early when their cheap power supplies burn out. I went through a few rounds of orders but finally settled on a set of Philips dimmable A15 lights "with warm glow effect". They are small enough to fit in all fixtures I've run into for those kinds of bulbs. But the best feature is that they change temperature as you dim them. So you have the option of a cooler "soft white" (2700K) at full brightness, or all the way down to 2200K when dimmed! To a non-expert in lighting they subjectively looked the best and gave us the same warm, comforting glow we were looking for at night. So my advice, if you're looking to upgrade your house to warm bulbs, make sure to look for something 2400K or less. Others have mentioned checking CRI, and that's important. I don't know the CRI on the bulbs I got. Again, they subjectively looked the best. But there aren't a lot of options in the truly warm color range so it's a feature I had to not care much about. I also found some really great vintage filament style LED bulbs for a project (vintage style outdoor string lights with corded wiring; built from scratch). They're from a company I found on Amazon called Cmyk. Off brand, but they're the best option I found in that category and their packaging was actually really professional. They are labelled as 2200K, but they look even warmer than that. When dimmed about half way you get just the right amount of glow that you can see the faux-filaments. Super happy with those. Beyond that you can also just get color-changing bulbs like Philips Hue. Since all this went down I've been slowly upgrading to those instead. That gives you the option to choose really any temperature you want at any point. I'm not sure how the "quality" of light from that setup compares to a real warm LED lightbulb. Obviously you're getting a "warm" color by mixing red and green LEDs so it isn't a true color temperature. But on the other hand you're definitely not getting blue light, which is the important thing. Either way, subjectively they look great and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (Usual caveats about buying into a somewhat closed system applies; Philips Hues are sort of the best worst option today.)

onnnon 8y ago

I wear computer glasses at all times when working, and highly recommend them. It greatly reduces eye strain, and filters blue light. If anyone is looking for a good pair, I buy mine from Gunnar [0] (no affiliation). [0] https://gunnar.com/ https://gunnar.com/

holtalanm 8y ago
if you need prescription versions, you can get them at LensCrafters: https://www.lenscrafters.com/lc-us/blueiq-lenses https://www.lenscrafters.com/lc-us/blueiq-lenses I use those and they work wonders.
hestipod 8y ago
Tried these and some Uvex glasses that block 100% of blue light (Gunnars are very low % blocking relatively). Zero impact on my strain. I have seen many others state the same. It's obv there are many causes for strain, just wish I could figure mine out.
splittingTimes 8y ago
what about EagleEyes? Does anybody have experience with these? Blue light blocking: https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/blue-light-blocking https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/blue-light-blocking Computer sunglasses https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/digital-eye-protection https://www.eagleeyes.com/pages/digital-eye-protection

herf 8y ago

f.lux author here, still slogging through the article. It is hard to understand the light levels used because they use "power" (uW, mW) from a laser, and not "irradiance" (uW/cm^2 or mW/cm^2), so which area they have concentrated that light over is hard to understand. All I can see is it is from a laser, so the irradiance could be extremely high. The human lens filters most light at the peak of the given spectrum for free retinal (383nm), and so once you get to 450nm like an LED, the hazard data in the visual range is 100x less sensitive, see Fig 1 here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2011.00921.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097.... It bears repeating that computer screens have <5% the hazard-weighted irradiance of a blue sky. (Can't make a direct comparison with lasers.) Not sure the conversion to white light is correct, and it is unclear to me right now if this much retinal is available in vivo.

Forge36 8y ago
I'm running f.lux on my work PC (tones down a bad otherwise VERY bright-blue monitor). Thank you for reading/writing out your interpretation of the article so clearly (highlighting points others are likely to trip on not coming from a related background)
- hinkley 8y ago
  Have we fixed the “optimized for electronics store demo” problem with monitors yet? Part of my ritual of setting up a new monitor is to turn down the brightness and increase the contrast. They almost always default to very bad values. Brightness, temperature and green/blur balance are all off for an office setting. In the worst case the backlight was capable of outputting twice as much light as I really needed.
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    Most/all modern monitors have presets, one of which is "store demo". All you've got to do is pick the calibrated preset.
  - userbinator 8y ago

pmoriarty 8y ago

"The researcher found that a molecule called alpha tocoferol, a Vitamin E derivative and a natural antioxidant in the eye and body, stops the cells from dying. However, as a person ages or the immune system is suppressed, people lose the ability to fight against the attack by retinal and blue light." Does this mean that consuming alpha tocoferol can combat the toxic effect of blue light? If so, at what dosage?

polskibus 8y ago

So LED bulbs would be even worse, right? Is it time to go back to incandescent bulb?

chroem- 8y ago

It's more than a little amusing to see this at the top of HN only a few days after getting attacked for posting my personal experience with blue light and retinal degeneration.

alain_gilbert 8y ago
You should post the link. It could be fun to compare the comments !
- drivers99 8y ago
  chroem-'s comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634720 Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634316

nathan_long 8y ago

I am excited about LED lights for their efficiency, but keep seeing articles like this and don't understand the practical ramifications, like "what bulbs should I buy?" I messaged Cree on Twitter, expecting a very corporate response, but they linked to some studies (which I haven't yet had time to explore.) FWIW - https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue-light-and-light-night https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/street-lighting-blue-light-a... and https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=378#.WjLMBFWnGM9 https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/resources/newsroom/pr_story.asp?id=3... were the resources they suggested.

herf 8y ago
The message is: there is no more risk from LED than older sources, by the metrics we have now. I would suggest that one problem is that LEDs don't "warm dim" (unless you get some special ones from Philips and a few others), and people tend to dim them less overall.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  What do you mean by "warm dim"?
  - herf 8y ago
    An incandescent/halogen will go to warmer temperatures when dimmed. So it might start at 2800-3000K but be 2100-2200K at 1% brightness.
jonhendry18 8y ago
Perhaps you could look into buying red lampshades. The direct illumination of the LED would still be rather blue but the light passing through the shade would not.

dewiz 8y ago

Now I’m wondering about the damage of all those Windows crashes and blue screens :-) Seriously though, the sky is blue, the sea is blue, how come we’ve evolved into beings affected by blue light??

perilunar 8y ago
Yeah, but they're only blue during the day!
vladus2000 8y ago
This is affecting people in their 50s+, a lot of our evolution people had and raised offspring before this occurred so there was no evolutionary pressure to keep your vision much past that. It was good enough.

ChikkaChiChi 8y ago

Don't want any blue light from your devices at night? - AMOLED Android device with a custom kernel that supports color profiles set to fire only the red pixels. - Get transparent red film from Amazon and cover your Kindle screen. - Wear orange safety glasses at night to dramatically reduce all blue light. - Bonus difficulty: Wear red laser goggles. Do not attempt to drive!

paulkon 8y ago

https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen https://zerowidthjoiner.net/negativescreen I've been using it for some time now. By default I look at my phone, tablet and computer monitor in inverted mode. Video content is watched as normal. Makes it way easier to get work done and keep the eye strain to a minimum.

georgewsinger 8y ago

Implications for VR?

lechiffre10 8y ago

On a similar note, has anyone heard of Felix Gray? I've been thinking of getting a pair of lenses from them. They make lenses that filter blue light and they happen to look pretty good too.

exegete 8y ago

Do we know why bankers chose green instead of yellow for their eye shades? I know they wore them due to eye strain, but why green and not something else?

HIPisTheAnswer 8y ago

This is a huge problem. Neon light everywhere. I go out at night with sunglasses. The world is littered with light polluting salvages. That and combustion engines. I used to drive one. I used to behave criminally too. Light, sound, air pollution are real crimes. The world is littered with criminal brutes; anyone who uses bright neons, churns a combustion engine, or plays the stereo loudly. Soon the little people will be angry at the 'rich bastards who burn gas with their machines or waste power on overly bright aggressive lights'. Average person will then only afford a handful of KWh per month, and my life will be better. I wont stop any crowd from hanging gas/naphta burners or smashing neons tubes.

beams_of_light 8y ago

I wish I had never been privy to this information. All it's going to do is make me paranoid about yet another thing in life.

davidcyp 8y ago

google "blue light mrsa" Blue light kills cells. It's used in hospitals to kill germs and also use to treat acne. Hand dryers also use them. I'm not surprised it kills certain human cells as well.

ScottBurson 8y ago

Really surprised there's no discussion here about the ubiquitousness of black-on-bright-white color schemes in apps (including this text box I'm typing into right now, though for the most part, HN uses a soft beige tint for its background; but it's still dark-on-light). It's really quite unnecessary. For code editing I have a light-on-dark Emacs color scheme, which is much easier on the eyes. Yes, Macs have a setting to invert the color palette, but that's not useful to me — a lot of my windows are dark; I don't want them inverted, and it makes images unintelligible. What I really want is something that doesn't screw with images, but detects dark-on-light text and maps the colors in such a way as to preserve contrast and even hue.

asadkn 8y ago
For many of us with astigmatism, the trend to default to dark schemes would be quite troubling. They're painfully uncomfortable irrelevant of contrast. There's fuzzing and "halation". It took me a long time to figure out the why. I love dark layouts in terms of aesthetics, but I cannot use them. Without being biased, from what I have read so far, the research seems favorable for dark-on-light as long as proper room lighting is achieved and monitor brightness and contrast is adjusted for it. In poor light conditions, the inverse seems to be true. While there's a reason for current defaults, everything should be optimized for and have options for both black and dark schemes.
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  Fair enough; I don't mind other people using whatever they prefer, as long as I have an option for light-on-dark. I wonder, though, what the real problem is that you have with dark themes. It could be related to the combination of wide-gamut monitor blacklights and high-index plastic eyeglass lenses. I wrote something about this here: http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and-eyeglass-lenses.html http://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and...
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  I'm curious to why it's a problem. I have a astigmatism, but with glasses I have better than 20/20 vision and have zero issue with light-on-dark. Without glasses light-on-dark and dark-on-light alike are a problem to read.

foo101 8y ago

What would be the right daytime setting in f.lux to reduce the harmful effects of blue light? The default daytime setting under recommended colors in f.lux is 6500K. I tend to use a daytime setting of 5500K. Is 5500K good enough to reduce the harmful effects of blue light or do I need to go even lower?

oblib 8y ago

I bought a monitor a couple years ago that has a "Low Blue Light" feature you can turn on/off. At first I didn't like it. It kind of dulls the screen down and makes things look greener. But after using it for a couple months, along with a couple other monitors on my desk, my eyes were getting tired so I turned the feature on and used it for a few days to see if I could get used to it. When I switched it back off afterwards I was pretty shocked at how much more my eyes were instantly stressed. I turned it back on and have left it on since. I also turned the blue down on my other two monitors. And I can feel the difference when I set them back to their defaults too. I don't think I'd like it for TV, though I might get used to it as well, but for coding and surfing the web it works for me.

foolrush 8y ago

One would have thought that the thousands upon thousands of hours of daylight exposure would have already made us all blind if this was actually solid research.

linuxyz 8y ago

For this exact reason, I've bought a e-ink 13.3" monitor from here https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e-ink-monitor-save-your-eyes-iphone-computers#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-3-a-smart-e-ink... It's not cheap because it is the only one on the market. Apparently, constructors don't care about this future big health hazard...

sunseb 8y ago

So I have switched my coding theme from "Cobalt" to "Solarized Light"

wodenokoto 8y ago

I don't know if this is a stupid question, but if I set my LED lightbulb to warm-light, or set my OLED phone to blue light filter / warm light, am I still exposing myself to this dangerous blue light?

peterclary 8y ago

Something to consider for VR headset manufacturers and VR software developers? Pumping bright blue light into the eye at close range seems like the worst case.