I’m not disagreeing with you, I agree that a high cri 1800k would be a nice night light. I just recently deep dived into this last week when my kitchen lights all died last week

> One thing that Bullough suggests pedestrians and drivers do to stay safe under purple streetlights—or any lights, for that matter—is to remove sunglasses and blue-light-filtering glasses when walking or driving at night.

I first experienced that in a bathroom in England. Door open, regular white light. Lock the door, blue light. I thought I broke something when that happened.

I also suspect that many LEDs are designed for 220V, but here in switzerland it is 240V norm and in the middle of the day my power meter reads around 245V (I suspect it is because there is a lot of solar panels on the roofs around me), so it is not a negligible voltage difference if the electronic is not designed for it.

Halogen headlights have been the most common (and relatively cheap!) kind on the road for many decades. They're just like the tungsten filament incandescent space heaters we used to use at home, except they burn at a somewhat higher color temperature. (And the way they work is really really neat, but I digress.)

Halogens, while higher-temperature than regular tungsten headlights (which haven't really been used at all in many decades) are generally "yellow"-ish compared to modern HID (aka "xenon" or "metal halide") or LED headlights.

Anyway, I'm also bothered by lights when driving at night, and I find the yellower corner of the spectrum to be the least-bothersome of common lighting colors. The glaring ~6000k white of modern HID and LED is much worse, for me, apparently because of the extra blue spectrum.

But if it really is yellow-ish halogen lights in your side mirrors that bother you most*, then I can't tell you that you're wrong.

And if that is then case, I can potentially offer some constructive advice: I've owned a couple of cars (specifically, a 4th gen Firebird and an E36 BMW -- both products of the middle 1990s) that came from the factory with side mirror glass that was tinted a pale blue.

The slightly-blue tint attenuated yellow halogen lights, by design. It's a clever bit of optical filtering.

During the day, in the sun where there's tons of light, they worked mostly-normally: Reflected images had little bit of blue tinge, but whatever.

And at night, the halogen headlights that were nearly-ubiquitous in the 1990s had their reflected intensity turned down automatically. Compared to cars with mirrors that used clear glass, I could still see the lights of the cars behind me just fine. They were simply less-blinding.

It worked great around the times those cars were produced.

If that's really the problem you're experiencing*, then a very pale blue window tint on the mirrors may be exactly what you want for that issue.

* (I asked for specificity because it's important. That Firebird and E36 both became increasingly-annoying for me to drive at night as HID and LED lights became increasingly-common, and towards the end of my time driving them I was seriously considering having clear glass mirrors cut and swapping over to that. Not because the blue tint wasn't effective at filtering out halogen light (it was great at that!), but because it seemed to magnify the problems I experience with HID and LED headlights. The world was changing, and the unchanged spectral filtering became a burden instead of a boon.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mll-YDDAF4

This is how most LED bulbs in use today are purchased. In theory, LED is absolutely superior when engineered correctly, but it rarely is on a statistical basis when looking at the available products.

It's hard to make an incandescent bulb that is shitty, other than making it not last for a very long time. I'd rather a dead bulb than one that turns my street into a nightclub.

I'd guess about 20% of the lights in and around Orlando are purple now. Maybe the heat and UV makes it worse here?

There were articles a few years back stating that the blue emissions from these LEDs were rather energetic and damaging to the retina. Conversely, some articles used to claim that red light actually improves the health of the retina. I don't know if those results were corroborated or debunked afterwards.

I know that personal beliefs and biases affect our perceptions. But such diametrically opposite experiences are surprising. I'm curious to know what everyone else experiences and any insights on this.

This is true but irrelevant when cost reduction is the motivating factor for switching to LED lighting, because that motivation will extend to the upfront purchase cost of the lamps and they will buy whatever is cheapest.

The flicker is pretty annoying because the transition is an abrupt on-off. Where I am the city had the bright idea to wrap LED ribbons around the poles in the downtown area to make it look more interesting. They connected the ribbons without diffusers directly to the power source of the streetlight. So what has happened now is that as you drive or walk you are looking directly at an unshielded flickering LED.

I still continue to install incandescent bulbs. They look better, and as I live in a cold-weather country the heat they generate is welcomed.