Quality has not always been a priority when choosing lighting. Most lights are designed to illuminate your environment so you can see where you are and what you’re doing — it seems like a simple job. However, these lights come with certain hazards that interfere with our health and, in turn, many aspects of our lives.
By exposing us to the wrong kind of light and wavelengths, at the wrong times of day and night, standard artificial lighting is disrupting our circadian rhythm. This can affect our productivity and output at work, our moods and relationships, and our short- and long-term health. Given that the human body takes its cues from light, there is an opportunity for designing a more advanced form of lighting technology that meets our biological needs rather than compromises them. Standard lighting, however, does not currently achieve this.
What if we could remove the hazards of lighting and pull in the biological benefits? That is quality lighting.
Designing for Wellness
There is a growing trend around designing for health and wellness. Interior designers are looking for ways to enhance their lighting to improve the health outcomes of their users in a way that works with their lighting materials. The WELL Building Standard™ has prompted more builders and designers to ask how they can create built environments that set people up to thrive, being conscious of the effects to the circadian rhythm.
The human circadian rhythm — which gets its cues from the sun — regulates the healthy function of our tissues and organs, hormones, and our sleep-wake cycle. Forty-three percent of our genetic expression is tied to our circadian system. WELL’s specific parameters for circadian lighting, which mimics the light of the sun to drive the circadian system, have underscored the importance of proper lighting within buildings — preferably with circadian lighting.
What to Know About Quality Lighting
Historically, the design community has been setup to look at lumens and kelvin temperature, but kelvin actually has nothing to do with circadian lighting. When we prioritize those two values in our lighting, we are designing for quantity of light and not quality. When it comes to stimulating our circadian system with lighting, what matters is the quality of the good blue that mimics the light from the sun. True circadian lighting provides the right spectrum of light on the right curve to stimulate our biology, but not all circadian lighting technologies get this right. Color tuning, for example, is a placebo. It attempts to impersonate natural light by changing color throughout the day, which can have psychological effects but does not offer a biological benefit. The industry, however, is now shifting toward designs that yield real, tangible benefits for people’s wellbeing, and it’s a much needed shift.
The BIOS® SkyBlue® Experience
BIOS® SkyBlue® technology is true circadian lighting — it provides the right spectrum of light on the right curve to recreate natural sunlight and stimulate our biology. SkyBlue® achieves this by producing the natural blue-sky light wavelength, which communicates with our circadian biology on a cellular level through a non-visual photoreceptor in the eye.
BIOS has a unique approach that focuses on creating simple solutions using color temperatures of lights that are familiar to designers (e.g. 3,000K, 3500K, 4000K). While the color temperatures are familiar, the technology is highly advanced and specialized in wavelengths of light necessary to promote healthy circadian rhythms. This is particularly relevant in modern society where we spend most of our biological daytime indoors. Moreover, circadian lighting prevents us from getting improper exposure to the hazardous blue light at night when our bodies should be winding down for sleep. BIOS SkyBlue® lighting solutions provide the maximum good blue light with minimal bad blue light. This technology can be implemented into any existing LED to transform artificial light into natural light, which stimulates circadian biology and drives healthier sleep patterns — and healthier people.
Illuminate Your Lighting With BIOS
BIOS partners with lighting industry manufacturers and lighting designers to provide healthy, low energy lighting to everyone. To learn where to find lighting Illuminated by BIOS, customize your lighting with BIOS solutions, or become a BIOS manufacturing partner, get in touch with us today!
