Many people have become familiar with full-spectrum lighting through florescent tubes or Verilux style “full spectrum” products… which have been around for decades. These are products that have generally been represented as more “natural” or more like the sun. The promise was better mood and energy and less eyestrain.

In our opinion, these were better products than traditional fluorescent tubes or incandescent desk lamps as they attempted to round out the spectrum of light, with less saturation in the red part of the spectrum and perhaps more in the blue portion.

But… such “first generation” full spectrum lights were somewhat limited… if the goal was to mimic natural light. You can only get a florescent tube to do so much, and if you were to take a light meter reading from a first generation product and compare the spectrum to the sun’s spectrum, you’d see a marked difference. Today’s full spectrum lights, based on LED technology, can be “truly sunlike” (typically minus the U.V.) as it’s possible to tune the light however you want. So, if you want your full spectrum to be like midday sun (i.e. NorbSMILE) you can do that. Or, if you want it to mimic the setting sun, you can do that as well (NorbSLEEP). Within our website, you can see graphics that illustrate this.

The benefits of such lighting, Norb Lighting, are similar to what you might have hoped for with first generation full spectrum lighting—namely to attune the body to the sun’s spectrum and normalize daily hormonal fluctuations, reduce eye strain, reduce headaches, generally to feel healthier, more energetic and productive (when you should be) and more relaxed (during the evening hours). These type of lights provide more than illumination and rather than potentially disrupt natural rhythms help to support them.