Other than for spotting road puddles at night or ice on ski slopes, glare generally serves no useful purpose. It produces discomfort and makes night driving less safe. Glare seems to come hand in hand with bright lighting. With LEDs, however, there are several ways you can benefit from bright lighting without glare. Here are two of them:

Lamp Design

LEDs are unidirectional, which means the light doesn’t radiate in all directions like filament and gas based lights housed in bulbs and tubes. This unidirectional property of LEDs by itself reduces glare to people outside the illuminated area. But you can further reduce glare by using a lamp design in which the LED light is recessed within the lamp. With this arrangement, you won’t see glare until you’re practically underneath the lamp and looking straight up into the light.

Warmer Color Temperature

LEDs come in different color temperatures. Color temperature (specified as degrees Kelvin) doesn’t refer to the light’s heat output. Instead, it refers to the light’s resemblance to how daylight appears as the sun rises in the sky. Morning sunlight produces an orange-yellow glow (2,000 K), which transitions to a yellowish glow later in the morning. Pre-noon sunlight appears white (4,300 K) and high-noonsunlight appears bluish-white (6,500 K). The higher color temperatures contain glare-inducing blue light.

Blue light causes glare because it scatters inside the eye. That is, the eye’s internal fluid causes the blue light to scatter in different directions. This interferes with the eye’s ability to form crisp and sharp images. An LED light with a color temperature of 3,000 K has very little blue light and therefore doesn’t cause glare. It’s sometimes called a warm white light. Several towns and cities are using LEDs with warm white light in their street lamps. Warm white light also works well for indoor settings.

Use either of the two suggestions alone or in combination. If neither are feasible for your situation, LEDs are available with dimming capabilities so that you can adjust the brightness to a more comfortable setting.