Sleep Lab · Light & sleep · 5 min read
Red light or amber light for the bedroom?
Red and amber are usually presented as a competition. In a bedroom the more useful question is far less interesting: can you forget the light is on?
Where do you start when the light is too bright?
A bedside lamp usually fails on brightness before it fails on colour. The lowest setting is still bright, a display stays lit, or a small indicator keeps drawing the eye. If a lamp has that problem, changing its colour does not fix it. Colour is the last thing to decide, not the first.
What do the two colours actually change?
Both sit at the warm end of the light a small lamp can produce. Amber is closer to ordinary lamplight: it still reads as a room with a lamp on, and it lets you make out the edge of a chair or a doorframe. Red is a narrower slice, so it leaves less of the room legible and draws less attention to the object giving it off. Neither is a measure of how the night will go. They are descriptions of what you can see.
That is the whole of the comparison we are willing to make. We are not going to tell you one of them is better for sleep, because we have no first-hand evidence that would let us, and the pages that do say so rarely name where the claim came from. A colour is a property of a lamp. It is not a result.
What line do we draw on purpose?
AERÉ Ember is amber and red light at a level you can sleep beside — a night light, and not a light therapy device.
We put that sentence here because the two things are easy to confuse. A lamp that helps you find the door in the middle of the night is a piece of bedroom furniture. Claims about what light does to the body belong to a different kind of product, with a different standard of evidence, and we are not making them. If that is what you came for, this is not the page — and we would rather say so than let the wording drift.
What are we not going to print?
We do not print numbers for brightness or colour here, and we do not rank one shade above the other. Our own lights do not have written specifications with us yet, and a figure we cannot stand behind is worth less than none. We are also not quoting research or customer comments on this page: the English material we found on this comparison was either a page selling a lamp or an article repeating confident claims without a single first-hand source. We could not verify one, so we print none of them.
This is written for an adult bedroom, and nothing below is a recommendation beyond that. There is nothing to buy from this page either.
What three checks can you do tonight?
- Put the lamp out of sight. Set it where you cannot see the glowing part from the pillow. A light you can see from bed is a light you will keep noticing, whatever colour it is.
- Test the lowest setting after dark. Turn it on once your eyes have settled, not in a lit room. If it still makes the wall obvious, the colour is not the problem.
- See whether it goes off by itself. A lamp you have to get up to switch off is a lamp you will leave on. Check that it can dim to nothing on its own.
- Keep the room otherwise dark. One small light is easier to judge when nothing else is lit. Change only the lamp, not the rest of the room.
About AERÉ
AERÉ is a sleep and everyday-wellness home brand based in Hangzhou, China, designing twenty things for the hour before bed.
Questions people ask next
Neither is better in general. Amber leaves more of the room legible; red draws less attention to the lamp itself. Which one suits you depends on whether you need to see where you are walking.
Dim enough that you stop noticing it from the pillow. We do not print a brightness figure here, because we have no written specification to stand behind. Test it after your eyes have adjusted, not in a lit room.
No. It is a night light — a lamp for finding your way around a room after dark. We make no claims about what light does to the body, and we say so on the page rather than leaving the wording open.