Felix Gray Sleep Glasses Review: Blocking Blue Light to Improve Sleep
Exposure to light at night can make it hard for you to fall asleep, but it can also be bad for your health. There’s a particularly negative effect when you’re exposed to blue frequencies of light late at night. You can reduce the amount of blue light exposure by being around less blue light, or alternatively, you can filter out blue light with glasses.
Felix Gray sleep glasses do just that.
Why is blue light bad for sleep?
Our bodies’ sleep is influenced by light. Sleep isn’t a binary state of awake or asleep, but instead runs on a cycle, and certain stimuli affect how we move through the cycle.
One strong relationship that is well known is the relationship between the stimulus of blue light and melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that helps us fall asleep, but when you’re exposed to blue light, your body produces less melatonin, which holds you back from moving along your sleep cycle into sleep.
Naturally, as the sun sets, we’re exposed to less light, and we become sleepier as night creeps up. When the sun rises, we are once again exposed to blue light from the sun, melatonin production ceases, and we move out of sleep and into wakefulness.
This all means that more blue light makes it harder to fall asleep at night, and reduces our quality of sleep. To clarify though, blue light itself isnt bad. Its actually really good for your night sleep if you get a healthy dose of blue light in the morning. But the timing is everything.
How do you reduce blue light exposure?
In our modern days, blue light doesnt stop when the sun sets. It’s everywhere. It comes from lightbulb and every electronic device with a screen.
If you want to fall asleep earlier or improve your sleep, one of the first stimuli you should look at is blue light. Effectively controlling your blue light exposure can do a lot to help your sleep.
What are things you can do to reduce blue light exposure?
You can set up warmer lights in your home.
You can reduce the amount of time you spend using electronics with screens.
If you are using a screen, you can turn on dark mode, which cuts out the whites your screen displays.
On many devices, you can also turn on “night shift” mode, which tints everything a little orange to reduce the blue coming out of your screen.
You can wear amber or red glasses.
How do amber tinted glasses work?
Theres a great aphorism: you can pave the world or you can wear shoes. Changing every environmental factor can be difficult or impossible, so another solution is to put something over your eyes that filters out blue. Which is where Amber tinted glasses come in. Amber glasses absorb blue frequencies before they pass into your eye, making it easy to reduce blue light exposure.
None of this stuff is new science and amber lenses aren’t new. For a really long time, I used inexpensive red or amber wraparounds that I bought on Amazon for $20. These work at blocking blue light, but they’re ugly. Another problem, is they don’t come with a prescription, so if you wear glasses like I do, you have to fit them over your glasses, which isn’t a comfortable experience.
Felix Gray Sleep Glasses
Felix Gray’s Sleep Glasses are a pair of subtly-tinted amber glasses set into the stylish lenses designed by Felix Gray. You can get these without a prescription if you have perfect vision, or with a prescription for extra cost.
They look great. Felix Gray has several designs, and every single one of them looks cooler than the wraparounds.
The build is nice, and while Felix Gray is less expensive than your standard LensCrafters fare, the quality is no lesser. I have these with a prescription and I can see perfectly well.
The tint is also very subtle. I got the regular non sleep glasses for day time and there’s not a huge difference. You can go out wearing these glasses and you don’t look you’re trying to pull some aggressive fashion moves.
But importantly, the tint is subtle enough that colors aren’t distorted. They are a little yellow, but your eyes adjust and after a while you correct for that in your brain and things look normal again.
When you use classic amber glasses, you can’t see certain colors. Which is maybe fine if you’re sitting reading, but they make it difficult to see if you’re doing anything else. With red glasses, you can’t see certain objects against each other if they’re in the blue range. If you want to watch a movie or play a video game late at night, you have to take the amber or red glasses off, so you’re exposed to all of the blue light again.
With the Felix Gray Sleep Glasses, colors still come through, just a bit warmer. So while being on a screened device at night isnt ideal, you can do that with these and reduce the negative impact of that late work, movie, or gaming session.
While the Felix Gray Sleep Glasses have less of a tint than the old school wrap arounds, the product page at the Felix Gray website says they specifically filter the range of Blue Light that impacts melatonin secretion and are clinically proven to work.
It’s hard to validate that for this review: there are too many factors that go into sleep for me to say how well these do the job, but I can say I fall asleep just as quickly if I stay up doing computer work with these as I did with my wrap arounds.
If you have a strong interest in improving your sleep, The Felix Gray Sleep Glasses are worth checking out.