What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses instead of just turning one’s computer display’s blue lights off or very low in spaces where there are no other sources of blue light than the screen the person is watching? Suppose that the person has perfect visual acuity without eyeglasses. Suppose also that all other possible protective measures achieved by the blue light eyeglasses are achieved by other means, such as by using UV filtering eyeglasses of the same shape and frame material and frame color as the blue light eyeglasses assuming that the blue light eyeglasses do have such protection. Economic, ease of use, technical savviness, time needed to configure the display or other such reasons are out of scope of the question. Other situations where there is blue light are also out of scope just as the overall harm caused by blue light.
Blue is the B in RGB. It’s an essential wavelength used by RBG or RGBW (which includes white pixels) displays in order to accurately reproduce the various colors we want to look at. They are carefully blended together to reproduce billions of different colors.
Blue light has a higher frequency than red or green light, so prolonged exposure can be fatiguing on the eyes. But this usually requires many, many hours of screen time over many days - which I suppose is quite common for a lot of people. There are other factors which arguably contribute more to eye strain though such as uneven backlight strobing which can be an issue for lower quality displays.
The reason you can’t just turn the blue light off is you wouldn’t be able to accurately produce a ton of colors. Even if you aren’t necessarily viewing something with a ton of blue color in it at the time, removing all blue light from the equation would alter most of the other colors that you ARE looking at. There are software solutions such as f.lux that try to reduce strain by lowering blue light and compensate by raising “gentler” wavelengths, but they produce a visibly warmer, more yellowed effect which can be less than ideal in some scenarios.
Wouldn’t glasses do the same thing (produce warmer/sepia colors)?
As far as I know, yes some do - but I have also seen some that don’t have nearly as drastic affect on the colors you look at.
Take this with a grain of salt because I don’t know a ton about light filtering glasses, but I’m pretty sure that some of the more “color accurate” ones work by having polarizing lenses that don’t allow certain wavelengths of blue light through the lenses. Whereas the more sepia-tinted ones just apply that sepia tone filter across the lenses. Still, neither one totally blocks all of the blue light because that would drastically alter the viewing experience to make it unpleasant/unviewable. Try going into your monitor’s color settings and setting B all the way to 0 and see how it fucks up all the other, non-blue colors.
I believe the general guidance is high quality filtering glasses > software solutions. But I would only worry about it if it’s an actual problem that you struggle with. I personally run f.lux every night at sundown, but it’s on a very mild setting that you wouldn’t really notice unless you toggle it on and off.
I wear blue light filtering glasses for working at my desk. You can order them with varying intensity, and there’s some visible differences with higher strength, but often you don’t really notice the difference after a while.
The idea with them isn’t necessarily to filter out all blue light, it’s to filter out some of it, to hopefully reduce some of the strain over a long period, not necessarily to block all blue light at once. It’s also useful on nights when I’m working before bed, because one thing they have proven is that blue light fucks with sleep cycles.
They’re not safety goggles, they’re more like sun screen. It’s gonna get through, but not as much, and that makes a difference over long time frames.
What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses
There isn’t. It’s been debunked completely from the get-go. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/21/969886124/do-blue-light-blocking-glasses-really-work
such as by using UV filtering
Your monitor/phone isn’t generating UV.
Literally from the “debunking” article you posted:
The only thing they may be good for is that studies have shown the blue light can interfere with our bodies’ light cycle
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I have a software add on that filters blue out of my screen at night when it could cause sleep disruption. The result is that the screen is overwhelmingly reddish and colours in images are hard to perceive reliably, but if I’m reading that’s fine. Other people might not be okay with that.
I don’t know what the hubub is about eye damage. That’s new to me, but it does trigger the suppression of certain sleep hormones in humans.
As far as I know, there is software that will do this. However, that software usually needs some higher permissions to be able to be able to change the colors of the computer’s whole output. For windows this is usually not a problem unless it’s a work PC / laptop. For Android it means you need to have a rooted phone, otherwise no-blue-light apps will just apply a red filter on top, but not actually stop emitting blue light.
If you’ve got a rooted android you might want to try to flux app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.justgetflux.flux
I suppose my explanation is out of scope, but that’s the only real reason that I know of.
I suppose my explanation is out of scope, but that’s the only real reason that I know of.
It really isn’t. This question is circular and relies on a presupposition that becomes ridiculous from the subsequent arbitrary rules imposed.
;tldr OP’s question is out of scope for ELI5
Would you mind elaborating on your reasoning that lead you to the conclusion that my original question is circular? I am in no way claiming it isn’t, I’d just like to see the reasoning.
What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses instead of just turning one’s computer display’s blue lights off
Other situations where there is blue light are also out of scope just as the overall harm caused by blue light.
Your question becomes ‘why wear eyeglasses to filter blue light when there is no blue light?’ The answer is “Science doesn’t say that”.
I see your logic. Thanks 👍
It is my understanding that most LEDs are inherently blue, but they add phosphors that mask the appearance of that blue light, making it appear white to our eyes.
If you look at the spectrum for an LED bulb there is almost always a big spike in the blue part of the wavelength.
So, if you were to “turn off” the blue light, you would be turning off the source of the light itself. Because of that, filtering is often used to lessen that blue bump in the spectrum.
Uh, leds for a long time only were available in green and red. The invention of the blue led came rather late, leading to the explosion of led use because now you could finally show all the colors in a display (and create white light).
The reason is that the assumption ‘no other light sources aside from the screen’ is almost impossible to control for. You’d have to be in a room with no daylight coming in and zero other blue light sources emitting from say a smartphone, clock readout, artificial lighting for the room and/or any of its appliances.
Even accepting this ridiculous decision to rule ‘all other sources of light out of scope’ then the obvious only possible answer is that THE SCREEN EMITS BLUE LIGHT OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF SOFTWARE COLOUR SETTINGS. For example, LCD screens use a white light bulb to light up a screen of LCD pixels. This white light leaks. It’s why LCD screens have lower contrast (black looks dark grey).
I’ll tell some background on why I asked the original question.
I am using a setup where I have adjusted the amount of blue light emitted by my display to as low levels as I could from the interface accessible through the physical buttons in my display. My display is also set to be so dim that when some other people took a look at my display, they had a hard time seeing almost anything even at a good viewing angle.
I also have the night light feature set to as warm as possible on my Ubuntu Linux.
I can also easily control all other possible light sources in the place I am in, including blocking virtually any and all sunlight.
I do know that ambient lighting can be beneficial to the eyes, however. I solely came up with the original question out of curiosity and actual real life setting in mind.
The display I use does look like it is from the control panel of a submarine but that is not a problem to me as a programmer that uses no syntax highlighting as I see no need (or any positive effect from highlighting in my case: I wouldn’t read a novel with different words in different colors; I find such features in editors distracting (and Vim or a similar editor without plugins tends to be pure bliss compared to IDEs)) to highlight syntax while programming; all the semantic information I need is in the source code text (i.e., without color data) itself (excluding e.g. colorForth when rendered the way that language is (AFAIK) typically rendered on the screen).
