Change Your Light Bulb, Flatter Your Face

Do you know the sacret that why the camarerman always can make you look "good" every time? Ok, I will tell you. The sacret is great lighting. Anybody who has seen television or film production up close knows that it takes longer to light a scene than to do almost anything else. And there’s a reason to take the time: Great light can make people look gorgeous. Bad light can make them disappear. A new kind of light that would make everybody look fantastic, even late at night: LED bricks.

LED bricks are just square arrangements of LEDs, or Light Emitting Diodes. And you have probably seen LED lights in tons of places — on the tail lights of most modern cars (replacing bulbs that wear out quickly vs. the average 50,000-hour life of an LED), for example, or at stoplights, where the traditional bulb has been replaced by hundreds of little points of LED light. And if you watched the Olympics, you saw millions of LED lights shining wild, crazy colors on the outside walls of the Aquatic Center.

These LEDs could theoretically shine up to 16 million different colors… including a special color that is the "healthy glow" of this story’s title. More on the secret color, and how you can use it, in a moment.

First, though, the results: It worked. My bride, Carrie, said, “Yes.” My new in-laws, as far as I could tell, were happy. And in spite of my groomlike nerves and my citylike pallor, I looked pretty good. So did everybody else. And here’s the kicker — it saved money on our electric bill.

Yes, LEDs use much, much less electricity. Here are the numbers: An LED produces about 400 percent more light (the unit of measurement is called a “lumen”) than a regular light bulb. And it uses half the electricity to power it. Even better, when you dim an LED, it uses even less juice. Plus, unlike conventional light bulbs, LED lighting can be focused. What does that mean? It means LEDs can throw light exactly where you want it — this may sound trivial, but if you’re thinking about saving money, it’s actually a very, very big deal.

Here’s why: If you look at a regular, round, 60-watt light bulb, you see that the light flies outward from it in all directions — up, down, left, right, at all angles. That’s nice, I guess, but if you have a light bulb in a lamp on your desk, for example, you only want light on your desk. Not on the ceiling. Not in your eyes. So you put a lamp shade around the bulb. Great! Pretty! And, if it’s a Tiffany lamp shade, expensive! But there is a big irony: You’re now powering an entire light bulb and blocking about 50 percent of the light, on purpose!

It gets even more ridiculous when you look at recessed lights, which are often found in the ceiling of your kitchen or bedroom. A solid 40 to 50 percent of your light is now lighting … the insulation in the floor above you.
Then, add this maddening fact: Ninety percent of the energy used to power a normal light bulb is lost as heat. Yep, Edison was a genius, but only 10 percent of the electricity in the system he created (and which you paid Con Edison for) is actually turned into light. This is why you have to turn off a light bulb for a while before you can put your hand on it — all that heat is wasted energy.

All right, enough beating up on conventional lighting. Here’s the alternative, followed by the secret “beauty” color. First, the solution: LED lighting for the home is emerging as a viable, and cost-effective, alternative to conventional bulbs. And they can make a much, much warmer light than CFLs (compact fluorescents — those twisted light bulbs). CFLs throw light with all the warmth of a meat freezer.

LEDs take the 120 volts of alternating current (AC) that comes into your house and, using small transformers, drop the current down (often to 24 volts) of DC, or Direct Current. Those transformers lose only about 10 percent of the power in the conversion. Then, the rest of the electricity runs the LED, which lights your room, again, using only about half the electricity required for the old bulbs.

In other words, when the night goes, the more you should throw a little more pink into the mix. Just turn up the color. With LEDs you can do that. And everybody will look fantastic. Even me.