The base of the lamp has two sliding knobs. A single toggle adjusts the heat, from cool white light all the way to red. We adjust the intensity, from an ultra-bright glow to a non-dazzling glow. Hard presses of each button advance, while holding the toggle to one side or the other adjusts the lighting settings quite slowly – quite slowly, at first, I sometimes wonder if it’s happening.
Maximum brightness is 1,000 lumens, the approximate intensity of a 75-watt incandescent bulb. At this brightness, the battery lasts about five hours. At a lower intensity, this can last up to a dozen hours.
Red shift
Photography: Matthieu Korfhage
There is one additional feature that I like at night, which is the red light mode. There is little evidence that blue light from your small smartphone is keeping you awake at night. But many studies show that wavelengths of blue light can affect melatonin levels and therefore your body’s circadian rhythm, whereas red light does not.
Red light therapy is, of course, the domain of TikTok as much as science – one where wild exaggerations sit alongside legitimate uses and benefits. For every sleep study showing that red light is superior to blue light when it comes to melatonin levels, there is another that shows that red light is associated with “negative emotions” before bed.
So I can only offer my own experience, which is that the Edge Light Go red reading lamp offers me a pleasant liminal space between waking time and sleeping time, a space that is not offered by a basic nightstand lamp. It allows me to sort of luxuriate in a darkroom space that still allows me to see and read, and escape a little more easily.
If I fall asleep, the light automatically turns off after 25 minutes, which means I won’t do what I do too often, which is fall asleep while reading, then wake up, alarmed, to a room full of bright lights in the middle of the night.
Caveats and quirks
Photography: Matthieu Korfhage
That said, for all the virtues of portability, the Edge Light Go doesn’t have a base heavy enough to keep the light from tipping over if I fold it forward from its lowest hinge. This can be annoying when trying to use the lamp as a reading light from a bedside table or on the arm of a sofa.
