Would you like to give your bathroom a new look? Look no further as including vanity lighting will give your bathroom a fresh look and make it look more attractive. Besides this, your bathroom will be well illuminated and thus make it look brighter and bigger in size.
Apart from this, the lighting will make your bathroom to feel like a special home inside your home. Whether you want to take a quick bath or take a lengthy shower, be sure that you will always yearn to visit your bathroom every now and then. When done right, it definitely pays off.
When it comes to buying vanity lights, one critical factor you should put into consideration is their lumen. The higher the lumen, the brighter the vanity light. In this article, we shall take a closer look at how many lumens for bathroom vanity light and other related ideas.
What Are Bathroom Vanity Lights
Simply put, these are lights that are installed over the bathroom sections such as the bathroom sink, on either side of the bathroom mirror or above the mirror itself. Sometimes, the bathroom may not have a vanity cabinet surrounding it.
In this case, the mirror is usually installed against the wall or as a part of a functional medicine cabinet. If you choose to install vanity lights, you can choose to do it either on the side of the mirror or above it. Either way, the vanity lights will brighten up your bathroom.
Besides making your bathroom look bright, they are able to give you a clearer and a cleaner image on your mirror. Therefore, you will have an easy time anytime you are dressing up for work as you will have a clear image of how you look in your outfit.
Your bathroom will also get different layers of lights such as the accent, task, and ambient lighting. In addition, these lights can help prevent accidents as the bathroom is one of the sections where 80% of older people experience accidents such as slip and fall. If your bathroom is well lit with these lights, you will be able to keep these accidents at bay.
Since these lights offer a unique ambience, they can enhance your mood. This can be attributed to the fact they come in a variety of colors. Besides this, you can use them to match your overall home design. After all, they come with a myriad of options to choose from. As we speak, these lighting fixtures come in a number of designs such as rustic, modern, and minimalistic designs. Finally, these lights can make your bathroom look bigger than it is. Thus, you can install them in a small bathroom and be good to go.
What Are Lumens
Lumens is a term used to measure how much light you are getting from a certain bulb. If a bulb has more lumens, it shows that it is brighter than others. However, if it has fewer lumens, it is evident that it has dimmer light. In fact, lumens can be compared to the way watts are used to measure the amount of energy being emitted by a certain power source.
How Many Lumens For Bathroom Vanity Light
When it comes to bathroom vanity lights, you should ensure that they are bright enough so that you can do everything you want with ease. After all, the last thing you would wish to have is a dull or dark bathroom. Therefore, your choice of bathroom vanity light should have as many lumens as possible.
To put this into perspective, The American Lighting Association recommends that your bathroom vanity lights should have a minimum of 1600 lumens. Typically, an incandescent bulb of 60 watts usually produces 800 lumens without any other extra lighting.
If the lighting fixture has an integrated LED light source, be sure that you will reduce the power usage and get more lumens. Consequently, your bathroom will look brighter than before. Like we earlier mentioned, the brighter your bathroom is, the bigger it will look. On the other hand, if you choose vanity lights with a lower number of lumens, be sure that it will look quite small.
What Are The Best Combination Of Bathroom Lights
For optimal lighting, you should ensure that you combine vanity lights that have higher lumens and lower wattages. To put this into perspective, the traditional incandescent bulb usually give out 500 lumens while using 40W for power.
On the other hand, a standard incandescent bulb gives out 800 lumens and then consumes 60 watts. Therefore, these lights can be quite expensive to use. If you have a 100W incandescent bulb, chances are that you usually pay $131.40 as part of your monthly energy bill.
However, if you have a modern LED light, be sure that this energy bill will reduce significantly. This can be attributed to the fact that it will consume less power and give more lumen. If you translate this into dollars, 5 to 8 watts will cost you $10.50 monthly. Therefore, if your bulb has a lower wattage and gives more lumens, you stand to save more on your energy bills.
Vital Consideration To Make When Choosing Bathroom Vanity Lights
When choosing bathroom vanity lights, there are a plethora of considerations that you should make. These include:
1) Usage
First and foremost, most bathrooms usually use dry-rated lighting. To put it into perspective, dry-rated lightings are those lighting fixtures that are meant to be used in places that do not have moisture.
Therefore, such lights should not be placed in areas where they can get splashed with water. In most cases, these lights are placed on the ceiling and offer the much-needed ambient lighting. However, this is not enough as one need to groom and apply her makeup.
If you were to use these lights for this purpose, you might have problems due to shadow formation anytime you have to dress or apply makeup in front of your mirror. Other times, the lighting may be uneven whenever you are flossing, doing makeup, or shaving. To avert this, you should have some task lighting in your bathroom.
Since the mirror is the focal point in your bathroom, you can install 3 to 4 vanity lights around your bathroom mirror. Ideally, it should be placed 75” to 80” from the bathroom floor. Besides this, there should be wall sconces on both sides of the mirror. Technically, they should be placed 66” from the floor so that light can be evenly spread in your bathroom.
On the other hand, the vanity lights for the shower and bathtub need to have wet-rated. Unlike the dry-rated models, these ones can resist moisture or water coming out from the bathroom faucets.
For optimal results, you should consider shower trim recessed lights. Such light will illuminate the shower area well. Besides resisting moisture, these ones can handle condensation and are thus safe for your bathroom.
2) It should be bright enough
Your bathroom lighting should be bright enough to mimic the day. This is the reason why they should have a high lumen. At least, the bathroom lighting should have at least 500 to 600 lumens. The task lighting should have 700 to 800 lumens. With this kind of lighting in place, be sure that you will have adequate lighting for activities such as:
- Doing your makeup
- Flossing
- Shaving
3) Color temperature
Besides having many lumens, your vanity lights should have a good color temperature. This will allow your face to look as natural as possible whenever you look yourself at the bathroom mirror.
4) They should mimic the daylight
To start with, the circadian rhythm is a natural process that determines how wakefulness and sleepiness in human beings. Generally, it regulates the sleep and wake cycle. It basically uses light and dark signals to predict what one needs to do at a particular time of the day. For instance, once you see the daylight, it signals the body to wake up naturally.
However, since daylight diminishes in the evening, you are bound to fall asleep. This happens naturally. In this case, your bathroom vanity lights should naturally wake you up, make you feel refreshed, and boost your overall mood.
5) Consider having dimmer
Although vanity lights need to be as bright as possible, too much light can be detrimental to your health. This is because your body’s circadian rhymes can be disturbed especially when you have to wake up in the middle of the night to brush your teeth or to just drink water.
Therefore, it is essential to install dimmers so that you can regulate the light emitted by the bathroom vanity lights. Besides regulating the brightness of these lights, dimmers also help save energy and add ambience to your bathroom.
6) Go for LEDs
Earlier on, carbon filament incandescent light bulbs were used to illuminate most bathrooms out there. However, these lights were later faced out due to the tungsten inside them. As a result, they used to cause a number of health issues and use more energy.
However, with the invention of LED lights, these problems became a thing of the past. These lights not only illuminate your bathroom well but also last longer. In addition, these lights hardly get too hot as they do not need too much energy.
Final Words
Although there are many ways you can transform the outlook of your bathroom, installing vanity lights has proved to be more effective than other methods. With bright vanity lights on the task areas, be sure that you will have adequate lighting for all the tasks you want to undertake in the bathroom. When purchasing bathroom lights, be careful to check the number of lumens yielded by a particular lighting. Remember that the more lumens a particular lighting produces, the brighter the lighting fixture, and vice versa. Make these considerations today, and you will give your bathroom a fresh look.