The receptors that cause light to be painful are sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum. Fluorescent tubes tend to load up on that part of the spectrum beca

The receptors that cause light to be painful are sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum. Fluorescent tubes tend to load up on that part of the spectrum because it is cheap to do so and high color temperature used to be a luxury feature, not because there is any technical reason to. Yellow "bug light" CFLs do not cause headaches for me, and are easy to read by. Unfortunately the color rendition is ... poor. It seems that there is no middle ground with CFL engineers.