The Future Is Incandescent: Why FireLight® Outshines LEDs

 Incandescence is returning—not as nostalgia, but as biology. For most of the modern electric era, “incandescent” was simply what light was: electricity turned into glow by heating a filament. Then policy and marketing recast it as wasteful, and LEDs became the default. But the science has moved on. When you look at spectrum, circadian timing, flicker, materials, and real-world household energy use, the old story starts to look… incomplete. This article traces how we got here, why “efficient” is not synonymous with “benign,” and why FireLight®, a purpose-built, full-spectrum incandescent heat-light tuned toward red and near-infrared, belongs in a different category than commodity lighting.

In this article:

• Why the future is incandescent
• Incandescence: a word worth rescuing
• The energy math no one bothers to show you
• LEDs vs incandescents: the health ledger
• Incandescent vs LED is the wrong question
• Incandescence: the body’s original language
• What this means in your actual home
• Conclusions and call to action

Now let’s start where this story actually begins: with the original lightbulb, the policy backlash that tried to retire it, and the biological reason it refuses to stay dead.

The future is incandescent

Why this word matters again.

The future is incandescent.

Not in the hipster coffee shop Edison-bulb cosplay sense (dim filament, reclaimed wood, nine-dollar matcha latte), but in the original sense of the word: to glow with heat, to shine with a kind of physical intensity that your body recognizes before your brain gets involved.

It’s worth remembering something that often gets lost in today’s lighting debates: incandescent light wasn’t a later alternative. It was the original lightbulb. For the first century of electrification, the default way we turned electricity into light was by heating a filament until it glowed. That basic physical relationship—heat becoming light—shaped indoor environments, circadian rhythms, and daily life long before efficiency metrics entered the conversation.

For a decade or two, however, “incandescent” was reframed as the villain of the energy story: wasteful, outdated, irresponsible. Compact fluorescents (CFLs) and later LEDs were cast as the efficient heroes. Regulations followed. In the U.S., the Department of Energy’s “backstop” standard effectively prohibited the sale of many general service lamps that don’t meet 45 lumens per watt, which is why old-school incandescents largely disappeared from ordinary retail shelves [1].

But that was never the end of the story. Specialty incandescent sources, especially lamps whose primary purpose is heat, including infrared, are explicitly excluded from the regulatory framework. While policy focused narrowly on efficacy, the science of light, biology, circadian health, and the unintended consequences of blue-heavy illumination continued to move forward.

We’re now at an inflection point where one thing has become increasingly clear:

If you care about how your body feels, sleeps, and heals, the quality and spectrum of your light matters at least as much as the number of watts on the box.

That is exactly where FireLight® lives: full-spectrum incandescent heat-light, tuned toward red and near-infrared, built to behave less like an appliance and more like a biological input.

Incandescence: a word worth rescuing

From physics to physiology.

“Incandescent” isn’t a brand. It’s a physics word. It simply means matter heated until it glows.

The sun is incandescent. Fire is incandescent. A tungsten filament inside a glass bulb is incandescent.

This matters, because for most of modern history, electric light meant incandescent light. More importantly, it echoes the conditions under which human physiology actually evolved. From early mammals onward, light was never just illumination—it was a primary environmental signal shaping sleep, metabolism, hormone release, and behavior. Daylight governed activity; firelight and sunset glow signaled rest. Our nervous systems, endocrine systems, and circadian clocks developed in constant conversation with a thermal, continuous spectrum of light. When people talk nostalgically about how “old light felt better,” they’re often pointing to this deep biological alignment, not to aesthetics.

Culturally, we also use the word to describe a certain intensity of aliveness: an incandescent mind, an incandescent performance. Somewhere along the way, that poetry was flattened into a line item on an energy bill.

Then came CFLs and early LEDs. CFLs promised efficiency but brought mercury-filled spiral tubes that hummed, flickered, and made every room look like a sad aquarium. Each lamp contains only a small amount of mercury, but it’s enough that the EPA publishes detailed clean-up instructions if one breaks, and OSHA has long maintained guidance on mercury exposure risks for workers handling fluorescent bulbs [2].

LEDs were the next wave: far more efficient, absolutely. A typical “60-watt equivalent” LED commonly uses around nine watts to produce roughly eight hundred lumens.

But “efficient” is not the same as “benign.” LEDs are semiconductor devices built on complex materials and electronics. Research has raised legitimate questions about hazardous substances in LED products at end of life, including metals such as lead, copper, and nickel, issues that matter when billions of lamps eventually become waste.

So we traded a simple glass-and-tungsten ember for a blue-heavy silicon device that has to be mined, chemically altered, packaged, driver-controlled, and ultimately managed as electronic waste.

And somewhere in that swap, we forgot to ask the only question that really matters—to biohackers, to parents, and to anyone with a nervous system:

What does this do to human biology?

The energy math no one bothers to show you

Why lighting guilt is misplaced.

Let’s deal with the classic objection first:

“Incandescents waste energy. They’re too expensive to run.”

There’s a slice of truth there. If you isolate a single socket, ignore everything else in the house, and compare lumen for lumen, a traditional incandescent does use several times more electricity than an LED.

But your nervous system doesn’t live in a socket. It lives in a house.

And when you look at where electricity actually goes in a typical U.S. home, the story changes fast. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that heating and cooling dominate household energy use, often accounting for forty to fifty percent of total consumption when air conditioning and electric heating are combined. Water heating is usually the next largest load, commonly around twelve to fourteen percent, with large appliances—dryers, ovens, refrigerators—taking up much of what remains [3].

Lighting, by comparison, simply isn’t what’s driving your bill.

Which means it’s very easy to obsess over whether a bulb draws nine watts or sixty watts while your HVAC system quietly burns kilowatt-hours just to keep a leaky, badly designed, poorly ventilated house hovering at seventy-two degrees.

Now anchor this to something concrete. When we ran the numbers for our own systems using typical U.S. electricity rates, here’s what it actually looked like:

• Running a Classic FireLight® Sauna for an hour costs on the order of eighteen cents of electricity.
• Running a Glow Infrared Therapy Light for an hour comes out to roughly four to five cents.

At that scale, the meaningful economic question isn’t “Can I afford incandescent light?” It’s this:

Is the tiny additional cost of biologically coherent light worth the payoff in sleep quality, recovery capacity, mood stability, and metabolic rhythm?

If the answer is yes, incandescence stops looking like a guilty pleasure and starts looking like what it actually is: part of a sane health infrastructure. For anyone already investing in training, nutrition, supplements, and sleep, the economics are almost beside the point. The real cost isn’t a few extra cents of electricity, it’s living under light that quietly works against your biology.

LEDs vs incandescents: the health ledger

Why watts miss the point.

Once you zoom out from watts, the incandescent/LED story flips. The most important differences are not about brightness. They’re about spectrum, timing, and physiology.

Spectrum and circadian biology

The last fifteen years of circadian research are remarkably consistent on one point: blue-rich light at night is a problem.

Blue wavelengths are especially potent in suppressing melatonin and shifting circadian phase. In controlled studies, blue LED exposure produces dose-dependent melatonin suppression [4]. Harvard clinicians have summarized the practical takeaway: blue light at night is particularly disruptive, altering circadian rhythms more strongly than other colors in comparable conditions.

This doesn’t mean “blue is bad.” Blue in the morning is useful; it’s a wake signal. The problem is the now-standard modern pattern: dim, indoor light during the day, then intense blue-heavy illumination after sunset, often layered with screens. Reviews of the literature link evening blue-rich exposure with worsened sleep quality and downstream issues.

A classic incandescent, by contrast, is a domesticated star. Its spectrum is continuous and thermal: heavy in red and infrared, with relatively less blue, especially in warm color temperatures. FireLight® pushes further into the red and near-infrared bands by design, which makes it especially compatible with evening environments where you want your endocrine system to read “downshift,” not “midday.”

When people say LEDs are healthier because they’re efficient, they’re only looking at the grid, not at your hypothalamus.

Flicker and electronics

Most white LEDs are not “just light.” They’re light plus drivers, current control electronics, and often pulse-width modulation for dimming. That’s a lot of circuitry between the wall and your retina.

The practical consequence is that many LEDs introduce high-frequency flicker. You might not consciously see it, but your nervous system can register it, especially in peripheral vision and over long exposure periods. Some people experience headaches, eye strain, agitation, or a subtle sense of “wired” under certain LED environments.

An incandescent filament behaves differently. Feed it power; it glows. The thermal inertia of the filament smooths the cycle. The result is essentially analog light: stable, continuous, and, for many people, subjectively calmer.

Materials and end-of-life

CFLs are the obvious cautionary tale because of mercury, and the official cleanup guidance exists for a reason. [2] LEDs avoid mercury, which is a real improvement.

But LEDs shift the burden into a different domain: complex components, electronics, and metal content that can contribute to hazardous waste concerns, especially at scale [5].

An incandescent bulb is almost endearingly simple: glass, tungsten, a bit of metal in the base. From a “what is this made of?” standpoint, it’s hard to beat.

Incandescent vs LED is the wrong question

Why FireLight® is its own category.

For us, the real fork in the road isn’t “incandescent or LED?” It’s:

Cold, narrowband LED light designed for efficiency, or full-spectrum incandescent FireLight® tuned for human biology?

Most “red light therapy” products on the market are LED-based: narrow spikes at 660 nm and maybe 850 nm. That approach can be useful, but it’s reductive. It’s like feeding your cells a single nutrient in a capsule and calling it dinner.

FireLight® is a different animal.

Our FireLight® Spectrum was built over a decade of R&D to mimic what your body expects from nature: a smooth, continuous curve of red and infrared output, with concentrated power in the near-infrared band that matters for photobiomodulation and deep tissue interaction. (And yes, it also runs hot enough to deliver real sauna-grade hormetic stress and towel-dripping sweat, not just “warmth.”)

This distinction matters for brand clarity too: FireLight® is not a commodity bulb. It’s not the thing you grab in a bin at Home Depot for a chicken coop. It’s a purpose-built, biologically tuned incandescent source whose “secret sauce” lives in spectrum and irradiance, not in vibes.

Incandescence: the body’s original language

What the ancients knew.

By this point, the policy context is clear, the energy math has been laid out, and the circadian and materials science are doing their work. What’s interesting, almost funny in hindsight, is how little of this would have surprised people who were paying attention to the body long before lighting became an efficiency problem.

Across Sanskrit literature and later Tantric traditions that treated the body as an intelligent multi-dimensional living system rather than a machine, vitality itself was described as radiant heat. The word tejas is often translated as radiance, brilliance, inner fire. Not metaphorical fire, but lived, physical luminosity: heat you can feel, light you can sense, presence with temperature.

What’s striking is how often contemporary translators and modern writers working with these traditions converge on the same English word when they try to capture that state. Again and again, tejas becomes incandescent. Not because it sounds poetic, but because it’s precise. There aren’t many English words that hold heat and light together without slipping into abstraction. Incandescent does.

This isn’t spirituality drifting away from biology. It’s an earlier language describing the same phenomenon modern physiology now measures in mitochondria, circadian signaling, and nervous-system tone. Human beings have always responded to light as a compound experience: brightness plus warmth, illumination plus heat. Fire understood that. The sun understood that. Early electric light understood that too.

What modern lighting forgot, in its rush toward efficiency, is that these qualities were never separable in the first place. When light is stripped of its thermal character, when it becomes spectrally narrow, electronically mediated, and disconnected from heat, it may still illuminate a room, but it stops speaking fluently to the body.

Seen this way, the renewed interest in full-spectrum incandescent light isn’t nostalgia and it isn’t rebellion. It’s a quiet return to a first principle: light that carries warmth carries meaning for human biology.

What this means in your actual home

How people actually use FireLight®.

You don’t need to throw away every LED in a fit of righteous rage. You don’t need to light your kitchen like a 1920s speakeasy. And you definitely don’t need to live by candlelight unless that’s genuinely your thing.

You do need a strategy.

Here’s the simple pattern we see emerging among people who care about biology at least as much as kilowatts, and who actually want their homes to feel good to live in.

Daytime anchor

Natural daylight still sets the rhythm. Morning light in the eyes, real daylight on skin, and time outdoors help anchor circadian timing in ways no indoor environment fully replicates. The point isn’t to compete with the sun, it’s to extend its logic indoors.

That’s where full-spectrum incandescent light matters. FireLight® picks up where daylight leaves off, supporting the same biological cues once you’re back inside, at your desk, or moving through the later hours of the day. Instead of switching abruptly from sunlight to cold, blue-heavy LEDs, you’re giving your nervous system a smoother handoff, one that stays aligned with how the body actually reads light.

Work and evening environments

Use LEDs where they make sense: high ceilings, hallways, closets, spaces you’re passing through rather than inhabiting. But once the sun starts going down, bias hard toward warmer color temperatures and dimming. Cold, blue-rich overheads after sunset are the lighting equivalent of drinking espresso at 9 p.m., possible, but not exactly kind.

This is also where one of our favorite Glow “secrets” comes in. While many people know our single-bulb Glow as an infrared therapy light for recovery, skin health, and circadian support, its most interesting uses often show up outside of “therapy” altogether. Many people don’t realize that pointing a Glow at your laptop or external monitor dramatically improves how screens feel to use. The red and near-infrared light smooths the spectral harshness of LED screens, counterbalances blue-heavy output, and even reduces the nervous-system buzz that comes from screen flicker. It’s not about blocking the screen, it’s about bathing it in better light.

Once you try it, it’s hard to go back.

Your healing zones

This is where FireLight® really shines. Desk, sofa, bedroom, sauna: places where you’re actually spending time, thinking, unwinding, or recovering.

A Glow beside the couch in the evening feels less like “lighting” and more like having a small, clean fireplace on. No smoke, no particulates, no creosote, no mess—just warmth and presence. It’s not uncommon for longtime customers to use Glows exclusively after dark, or to replace nearly every evening light in their home with them because the vibe is so unmistakably calmer.

The FireLight® Sauna, of course, is the dedicated version of this principle: heat, light, and nervous-system downshift happening together, on purpose.

Stop apologizing for incandescence

Once you understand that lighting is a relatively small slice of household electricity use, and that a FireLight® session costs pennies, the old guilt script around “wasteful bulbs” starts to feel very 2009.

At that point, the question stops being about efficiency and starts being about how you want your home to feel at night. Warm or cold. Alive or sterile. Supportive or subtly agitating.

Most people, once they experience the difference, don’t have to think very hard about the answer.

The future is incandescent

Not nostalgia, biological coherence.

The regulatory story ended up roughly where it needed to: cheap, inefficient general-service incandescents were phased out for mainstream lighting via efficacy standards, while many specialty heat/infrared lamps remain outside the core definition.

In parallel, the biology story matured. We now know that light is not neutral; spectrum and timing matter; and blue-heavy, flickering light at the wrong time of day carries real physiological costs.

So the question isn’t whether incandescents “deserve” to exist. The question is:

What kind of light do you want touching your nervous system for hours a day?

A cold approximation of daylight engineered around a spreadsheet, or a tuned, full-spectrum incandescent ember, like sunlight’s cousin, that wraps you in red and near-infrared warmth while your cells quietly get to work?

We’ve bet everything on the second answer.

The future of light is not fluorescent, and it’s not narrowband LED. The future is incandescent again—only this time, it’s FireLight®.

References

[1] Federal Register (DOE). “Energy Conservation Program: Energy Conservation Standards for General Service Lamps” (May 9, 2022).

[2] U.S. EPA. “Cleaning Up a Broken CFL” (mercury cleanup guidance).

[3] U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). “Electricity use in homes” (updated Dec 18, 2023).

[4] West KE et al. “Blue light from light-emitting diodes elicits a dose-dependent suppression of melatonin in humans.” Journal of Applied Physiology (2011). https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.01413.2009

[5] Lim SR et al. “Potential Environmental Impacts of Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs): Metallic Resources, Toxicity, and Hazardous Waste Classification.” Environmental Science & Technology (2011) (ACS). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es101052q