Bathroom lighting - PART TWO

23 Oct

LIGHTING THE BATHROOM MIRROR EFFECTIVELY

Of all the areas in your home where light is important - that magic moment in front of the mirror, when you check yourself and give yourself a wink and a smile before heading out into the world, is one of our top priorities!

Most bathrooms - in both brand-new builds and older homes - seem to be lit with the overriding intent of making you look like you haven’t slept in 6 months every time you look in the mirror!

Light coming from behind your head, or super strong fixed lighting directly above your head, throws Dark Shadows down your face, can make it look like you are going bald overnight and generally mean you can’t see the details you’re looking for - like those stray hairs missed by the razor.

Perfect mirror lighting takes planning, and often requires flexibility in your overall bathroom design. The principle of perfect mirror lighting is quite simple.

You need to have the light BETWEEN your face and the mirror to chase those shadows away and let you see yourself in all your glory!

When we’re designing a bathroom, we have a whole list of questions we run through to figure out what’s on the walls, if there’s a shaving cabinet with doors, a flush mirror, light sucking dark charcoal tiles… so many elements go into mix. Once we have our answers, we can work out exactly where that light needs to come from and ensure it will end up in the right place - between your face and your mirror - and making sure we light the room.

Recently, we were called to site to check over an installation, and our client mentioned that their daughters mirror lighting wasn’t working as they’d imagined. So up we went and what we discovered was such a simple thing - but not something you could expect everyone to know - the lights were aimed in the wrong direction.

The lights were aimed onto the tiles, which were a lovely feature, and the light had been aimed to hero them – so as a room it looked fantastic! But stand in front of the mirror and NADA! No light to the face. A short set of steps and an adjustment of the lights, and hey presto! A young woman’s approval was gained by redirecting those lights to illuminate her face perfectly. The room was still well lit, and the tiles looked great - but they were no longer the most important thing in the room. The person using it was.

So, how do you achieve great mirror lighting in the bathroom? It comes down to types of light, and how/where you place them.

Forward Facing Light (or “Hollywood Lights”)

Say “Hollywood Lights” to most people and they immediately think of those bars with a series of light globes surrounding the mirror. There’s a reason those lights were invented and were so popular – and remain so for professional makeup stations. They push huge volumes of light towards your face, lighting up every detail. Now, you may not like the aesthetic of the globes, but the principle of light is key. With LED you can achieve that forward throwing diffuse light by building it into your mirror or using high powered wall lights to either side of your mirror. This light needs to be high quality (high CRI and high consistency of CCT colour) and be putting out a lot of lumens to work. We always work with the cabinet maker to integrate high quality light into the mirror to create this effect, the off the shelf ones don’t really cut it.

Over Mirror Wall Lights

This style of light fitting is so perfect for the function at the mirror – however it is not to everyone’s aesthetic, and it can’t be used when you have a surface mounted mirror cabinet. There are many variants of this style in the marketplace, and sadly not all of them provide the function that they should. The value of this type of light is that it is powerful, diffuse and slightly directional. The diffuse light is being pushed down between your face and mirror. It is providing just enough directional shadow to the features of your face to model it in the mirror, and then it is reflecting off the basin and mirror to fill in from a horizonal and upward direction. As always, light quality is super important at the mirror, and with this style, watch out for low lumen outputs or you’ll be disappointed.

Linear LED to the Ceiling

This approach is another one that can be highly effective but is not to everyone’s aesthetic. It’s also only useful in ceilings 2.7M and lower (in fact the lower the better), Placing this diffuse light in the ceiling means you keep lovely clean lines in the bathroom, nothing hanging off the wall, or punching holes in it. You need a high-quality LED tape and it needs to be 20W/M - high output – to get enough light for function. This powerful, diffuse light illuminates the entire room by reflecting off the wall tiles and mirror – and pushes all of that soft powerful light to your face.

Spotlights and Adjustable Downlights

One of the most common solutions for mirror lighting is well placed spotlights or adjustable downlights. These types of lights can be moved on the ceiling and aimed to your mirror to create the ideal reflected directional light for your face. You need to be careful of glare reflections – if you mirror goes all the way to the ceiling, this is not the right answer for you. It’s a solution that is 100% about function, and ideally is always on its own switch, so you only turn those lights on when you really need them. Positioning and angles are determined by the light fitting selected, ceiling height, beam angles, adjustability, mirror placement and size and finally – the height of the person using the mirror. If you are a couple with a high height variance, then you’ll need 2 sets of lights – one each – to make it work.

I’ve mentioned Light Quality a couple of times, and it really is so important at the mirror (as is mirror quality, but we leave that to the interior designers). Light Quality can be measured, and we have this blog post to help you navigate the variables. Check out our Blog – Evaluating Light Fittings for Use At Home.

The most important elements to remember in the bathroom are:

1. Colour Rendering (the ability of a light source to represent colours faithfully).

2. Consistency of White (that's the colour temperature - how warm or cool the light looks, and then how consistent that colour is across different lights).

3. Glare control (creating light without glare is a key focus for lighting designers).

4. Efficiency - how much energy is used to create the light - and how much of the light created actually enters the room.

MINT lighting experts LOVE this kind of detail and have years of experience with choosing great light fittings.  We are here to help – so if you’d like a professional to take care of your lighting design, send us an email!

Adele Locke