Blue Light Isn’t as Bad as You Think
The rays from our screens aren’t as toxic as Grimes and Warby Parker might suggest
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When art-pop ingenue Grimes shared a midsummer Instagram post detailing her out-of-this-world “training regimen,” spectators wondered whether the elfin Canadian artist had gone full Silicon Valley or was merely having fun at the expense of her boyfriend, Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Explaining that she takes a “360 approach” to fitness, Grimes detailed an elaborate wellness program steeped in the biohacking sensibilities that have become a hallmark of the tech industry elite. Her purported routine includes mitochondria-boosting supplements, high-grade infrared lighting, and several hours in a sensory deprivation tank that allows her to “astroglide to other dimensions.”
Yet what stood out for many was the artist’s assertion that she underwent “experimental surgery” to eliminate blue light from her vision. The surgery, according to Grimes, “remove[d] the top film of my eyeball and replace[d] it with an orange ultra-flex polymer that my friend and I made in the lab this past winter as a means to cure seasonal depression.”
Grimes’ experimentation with light frequencies isn’t totally left field. Biomedical researchers have been studying the mechanisms that drive different light frequencies to heal or harm; companies like Warby Parker and Felix Gray are now shilling blue-light-filtering eye care products. But what is blue light, and why would it be considered bad?
Sunlight contains a spectrum of differently colored light rays that project at different frequencies. Red light rays occupy the longer, low-energy end of the visible light spectrum while blue light rays have the shortest wavelengths and highest energy levels of visible light. Potentially harmful ultraviolet or UV rays come next in the spectrum, with even shorter wavelengths and higher energy outputs that are just outside the range of what is considered visible.
Blue light is also emitted by products that have become ubiquitous in our modern world: energy-saving fluorescent lightbulbs, LEDs, and especially — you guessed it — computer monitors, smartphones, and tablet screens.
“We don’t know enough about the…
