The Best Bath Mirror Lighting

Buying Guide

If there is one room in your house where you really want to get the lighting right, it’s your bathroom.  Other rooms might have decor you want to accent (or hide) and different moods you want to set. But bad lighting in the bathroom won’t just highlight any mess in that relatively small space. It can also leave you looking worse for the rest of the day.

Specifically, we’re talking about the lighting around your bathroom mirror, the space where we get our first look at the face we want to show to the rest of the world. As such, it’s the place where we need focused lighting that minimizes shadows, with just the right amount of brightness and not too much heat. It’s a tall order, especially when you can expect your face to be so close to the lighting fixtures themselves.

There are a lot of options for the placing of those lights. If you already find the ceiling-mounted lights in your bathroom to be bright enough for general use, you might go with a simple, single light strip or bank of bulbs positioned horizontally above the vanity mirror. This will save space, and work perfectly fine as long as it’s not much brighter than the lighting in the rest of the room. For best results, you’ll want to mount those lights about 75 to 80 inches above the floor.

If you have the space and the funds, you might consider a better option no matter what the ambient light in the room is. That’s a pair of mounted scone lights on either side of the mirror. With or without an additional light overhead, these lights will combine to illuminate your face and cancel out shadows. These work especially well with taller or more rounded mirrors, and should be mounted at least 28 inches apart, 60 to 70 inches off the floor.

Don’t have a separate vanity mirror? There are plenty of lighting kits that can turn any mirror into a makeup nook fit for a Hollywood starlet. They typically consist of individual LED bulbs or lighting strips that attach by way of adhesive. They’re usually connected by thin wiring (hopefully transparent) and are sometimes powered by batteries. Whatever the shape of your mirror, you can attach them to the frame or just arrange them around the section of it that you’d like to use as a vanity. Just keep the same distance guidelines in mind that you’d use for an overhead light or wall sconces.

The next thing you’ll want to take into consideration is the type of bulb. The choice is more crucial than when deciding on a bulb for the closet or even the kitchen, because your face will be up close and personal with these lights most every day. Brightness is a major factor. You’ll want vanity lights that produce about 1600 lumens — enough to clearly illuminate your pores without giving you eyestrain. Mind you, that’s 1600 lumens total, not per bulb. As a general rule, a single incandescent 60 W light bulb produces 800 lumens, while a much more efficient LED bulb can generate that much light with 12 W. If you’d rather not do the math on a lighting rig with several bulbs, just make sure that it has a dimmer. You can always adjust it to suit your needs.

Brightness is an easily definable trait for a bulb, but for vanity lighting there’s an equally important one that’s harder to pin down: The CRI. That stands for Color Rendering Index, and it’s a measure of how well a light bulb reveals the color of the objects that it illuminates. That’s in comparison to natural sunlight in ideal conditions, which would have a perfect CRI score of 100. Light that distorts color relative to that would have a lower score: Fluorescents measure around 60-80, incandescent bulbs can be a 50 or below, down to a score of 10 or less for candlelight. LED lights can carry a CRI of 90 or better, making them perfect for vanity mirrors.

There is also a color temperature rating, which is a number that reflects how warm or cool your light appears. Fittingly, it’s measured on the Kelvin scale — the lower the number, the “hotter” it appears. You’ll want to look for LED bulbs or incandescents that come in somewhere between 2800 and 3200K, which is on the warm end of the scale but not enough to over-accentuate reddish hues.

Finally, give a thought to the actual temperature of your light bulbs. Remember that you’ll be up close and personal with this mirror pretty frequently. No matter how cozy warm lights make your vanity feel, it’s hardly worth it if they’re causing you to sweat through your makeup. Once again, cool-running LED bulbs are a good choice in this regard.

Maybe you’ve found a perfect light kit to turn you mirror into a vanity, but make a last check on the box before you buy. Are they specified as bathroom lighting? Some lights aren’t made to endure moisture on a long term basis, and that can spell disaster pretty quickly. Look for lights that are “wet listed” or have a “wet location” designation from UL or ETL. Those are independent testing laboratories certified with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and you can be reasonably sure they’ll stand up to your daily shower steam bath.