Bathroom Lighting 101: Bring your personal spaces to life with the right LED lights

Jul 14, 2023

Brightgreen

Leading LED lighting specialist Brightgreen explains how you can use LED bathroom lights to bring your bathrooms (and your faces) to life. Add Tru-Colour tech to light up your faces, and you’ll look up to 30% better in the bathroom.

What you need to know about light quality

To get the perfect light quality, your bathroom lights’ Colour Rendering Index or CRI is critical.

If you choose a low-CRI bathroom light fixture, colours will look unnatural. As a result, you’ll think your face looks unhealthy and sickly (when it doesn't), and you’ll apply more makeup (when you don't need to).

You want at least 80 CRI for your LED bathroom lights. But there's a catch. When it comes to anything to do with your face, red is the essential colour. Why? Blood. And if the CRI score of your bathroom light fittings only covers the standard scale (R1 to R8), and red is ignored, which is on the extended scale (R9 to R14), your face will look washed out.

But Brightgreen Tru-Colour LEDs have changed the makeup (and CRI) game. With the purest red on the market and scoring 98 CRI on the extended scale, it's like applying makeup under direct sunlight.

Colour temperature in your bathroom

Correlated colour temperature or CCT describes how warm or cool a light looks. A CCT that's too high (too blue) or too low (too orange) will also affect colour accuracy in the bathroom.

We recommend a CCT between 2700K and 3000K for the bathroom, depending on the space's function. A warmer light (2700K) will feel welcoming and is perfect for the powder room. A cooler light (3000K) is better for colour accuracy and is more appropriate for a master bathroom.

Bathroom lighting 101: How to pick your bathroom light fixtures

Getting hot, wet and steamy in the bathroom – IP-rated bathroom lights

Bathrooms are damp, moist places. So if you’re placing your lights in wet areas, you’ll want to make sure your lights can handle direct and/or indirect moisture.

You’ll need bathroom lights with Ingress Protection Ratings (IP Ratings) from IP44 (the first level of protection) through to IP67 (complete immersion protection). An IP44 rating will be sufficient for ceiling-mounted lights – even above the shower. And an IP67 rating is a safer bet at lower heights.

Ambient, task and accent bathroom lighting

If you want an in-depth guide to light layering, you can check out our guide to kitchen lighting. The same principles will apply to your bathroom light fixtures too.

Ambient lighting

You won't go wrong with standard bathroom downlights and other bathroom ceiling lights. They’re popular choices – affordable, effective, and understated yet elegant.

If you’d like to get a little fancy, you can add some style to your mirror with backlighting or bathroom vanity lighting. Wrap bathroom LED strip lights around the back of your mirror for a halo effect – they’re a fantastic form of supplementary general illumination.

Task lighting

Task lighting in the bathroom can be tricky. You might be inclined to think that a downlight above the mirror or the sink is enough, but overhead lighting on its own will cause harsh directional shadows.

You should add some bathroom lights that hit your face for optimal illumination. So how do you do it?

The best way is to position your lights on either side of the mirror and at eye level. Bathroom vanity lighting creates an even glow across your face and eliminates shadows.

For task lighting, we recommend:

Accent lighting

Bathrooms mean functionality. So it's easy to forget about decorative lighting. But if you have elegant tile arrangements across a wall or even a claw-foot bathtub, you can up the drama in your bathroom with some accent lighting.

Add recessed bathroom wall lights close to your ceilings to wash your mosaic walls with light. Or install in-ground uplights behind your claw-foot bathtub to complete your bathroom lighting ensemble.

Avoid the face punch of bright bathroom lights

Stumbling towards your bathroom in the dark and flicking on bright bathroom ceiling lights often feels like being punched in the face by light. Add dimmers, and you’ll be able to start your morning routine smoothly. It’ll feel less like a face punch and more like a candlelit night in the bathtub (which dimmers can help with, too).

Want to save your brainpower for the shower?

If you prefer to preserve your precious time for pondering in the shower, let someone else look after your LED bathroom lights. Get in touch with Brightgreen to bring your bathrooms (and your faces) to life with the world's highest light quality and expert lighting design. And did we mention complimentary advice, lighting layouts, lux calculations, and more?