Home lighting, blue-light filtering, and their effects on melatonin suppression

📖 Top 20% JournalJan 21, 2026Scientific reports

How Home Lighting and Blue Light Filters Affect Melatonin Levels

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Circadian Biology on OpenScience ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗OA ↗

Abstract

Cool white LED lamps exhibit a 12.3% , significantly higher than other lamp types.

Cool white LED and CFL lamps are associated with greater disruption of melatonin production compared to warm white LED, warm white CFL, and incandescent lamps.
Tunable LED lamps can reduce melatonin suppression from 10% at 5700 K to 0.1% at 2100 K.
Only two out of eight blue-light-filtering lenses significantly reduced melatonin suppression to below 0.3%.
The findings indicate that specific lamp technologies and settings may differentially impact sleep quality.

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Evening residential illumination possesses the capacity to impair sleep quality via the suppression of endogenous melatonin production, a process largely driven by short-wavelength (blue) light. In this investigation, we characterized the light emissions from 52 distinct examples across three common lamp technologies: light-emitting diodes (LED), incandescent, and compact fluorescent (CFL) lamps. To estimate the differential circadian impact of these sources, we determined the (MSV), melanopic illuminance, and photopic illuminance for each. Our findings reveal that "cool" white LED (median 12.3% MSV) and "cool" white CFL (12.1% MSV) lamps induce considerably greater melatonin suppression than "warm" white LED (3.6%), "warm" white CFL (2.6%), or traditional incandescent (1.5%) lamps. As potential countermeasures, we examined the efficacy of tunable Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) lamps and "blue-light-filtering" (BLF) lenses. The four tunable LED lamps demonstrated a profound ability to mitigate circadian disruption, reducing estimated melatonin suppression from 10% at a 5700 K (cool white) setting to 0.1% at 2100 K (warm white). An analysis of eight BLF lenses identified variable performance; while six had moderate impacts compared to uncorrected vision, their benefit was limited relative to standard clear lenses. Only two BLF lenses, distinguished by a "brown" tint, proved highly effective, reducing estimated suppression to below 0.3%. These results suggest that cool white CFL and LED lamps may exert a greater disruptive influence on sleep physiology than other lamp types. Conversely, tunable lamps adjusted to warm settings and "brown"-tinted BLF lenses represent beneficial strategies for ameliorating this effect. (Detailed measurement methodologies are available in a previously published study, with supplementary calculations provided separately).

Key numbers

12.1%

Cool White

Median for cool white lamps.

10% to 0.1%

Tunable Reduction

Reduction in melatonin suppression from tunable lamps at different color temperatures.

0.3%

Brown-Tinted Lens

Estimated melatonin suppression with effective brown-tinted blue-light-filtering lenses.

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Abstract

Key numbers

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