Both. Both are good.

Daylight for the work rooms and things like home-office or homework desks, warm light for cozy couch corners and bedrooms.

Or go full high-tech and install lights with adjustable color temperature.

I wasn’t expecting to feel so seen at this ungodly hour

Cold light is so clinical and miserable, and I refuse to have it in my vicinity at night if I can help it.

I dunno why, but warm lighting at night just makes me feel depressed. I need daylight bulbs across my house. Adjustable brightness preferred though, so I'm not blinding myself at night.

It's curious seeing people equate warm lighting with old people and old homes. Maybe it's just my region but everybody (especially boomers) switched to CFLs when those came out and then to the cheapest, nastiest cool LEDs with cornea-melting levels of blue light after that. Sometimes I feel like the only sane person when I'm walking around and seeing the insides of houses lit up the same color as you'd get from a $5 flashlight 15 years ago.

I have 4000k in the kitchen and bathroom and 2700K or 3000K everywhere else. After reading this thread I'm considering finding some high CRI adjustables because I also find the 4000k lights pretty harsh at night.

Modern led bulbs can do both and then with home assistant you can script it so the color temperature changes through the day as the sun changes.

In the morning my house is cool light around 6500k and over the day it warms up to about 3k

Part of my job is selling lighting.

The following conversation takes place at least once a day without falter:

X: I’d like one light like this please (puts some form of light on the table)

ME: ok (goes through the script to make sure they know what they want/it’s compatible/…yaddayadda).

X: oh and it needs to be warm in colour.

ME: 2700k got it.

X: yes, but like warm right? Because it’s led.

(Variant: the rando looking for something small for his toilet. “Oh you know, something like 18000 lumens and 60000k”

You value your eyes at all?)

Daylight bulbs are everywhere in Japan and it's so strange. I tried looking for warm light bulbs at a local store and they don't even stock them as an option. I do see them used in some people's houses so I'm sure it's not universal, but the prevalence of daylight/cool bulbs is weird to me, I'm very much warm bulb gang.

Modern society is telling me I need to take melatonin.
I tell modern society I make my own melatonin, and sleep perfectly fine because my lights are warm in the evening.

As a side note, one of the reasons why cold white LED light bulbs are a thing is because they're a bit more efficient than warmer light colors.

The reason is because they all just have 2 kinds of light emiting diode (LED) junctions inside - red and blue - plus a phosphorus layer on top that smooths those two perfect lightwave color peaks in the wavelength domain into a broader light spectrum, and the blue is more efficient than the red, so lamps with a higher proportion of blue emitters to red emitters - and which hence emit more light towards the blue end of the spectrum (i.e. a colder white) - will emit more light for the same power consuption than those with more red emitters and hence whose light is more towards the red side of the spectrum (i.e. a warmer white).

EDIT: So it turns out part of this which I learned 10 years ago is outdated. The efficiency thing is true but when I went looking for how phosphors (the layer between the LED emitters and the outside, which absorbs the single wavelength light from the LEDs and emits light with different wavelengths) prompted by the points made by another poster, from places like this it turns out that red LED emitters aren't at all used anymore, only UV and blue (whose light the phosphor then converts into light with different spectrum distributions depending on the material of the phosphor). If you search for it a number of recent scientific papers pop up around various such materials.

i put one of these in a ceiling fan and my roommate started referring to it as The Sun

she's not wrong but i like to be able to easily see the stuff on my desk I'm tinkering with ffs

White light is a must for makeup, or any time where you need to see colors accurately. Otherwise give me yellow all the way lol. I love the coziness.

Or, and hear me out. Get one that you can change. On a gloomy day, during the daytime have it at daylight white. In the evening a nice 2700k.

I have an actual full-spectrum daylight bulb and it’s pretty good. I use it when the days get really short, seems modestly effective. It’s not the typical “warm” lighting, it’s much more actual daylight. I can’t stand those hard white almost blueish light bulbs. Makes things feel industrial and cold. No idea why anyone calls them “daylight”.

I'm surprised to see pretty much all the comments stating that they prefer the warm lights. It hurts my eyes and feels very awkward to have light coming in through windows into a room with warm lighting, so I mostly use daylight bulbs.

Do warm lighting people just keep the lights off when their curtains are open, or am I alone in this issue?

I just want to be able to slaughter a pig if I need to. Gotta do that under cool whites my guy.

Daylight is full-spectrum, not just cool. Flicker-free and high color rendering index. If you can get that in a bulb (bit more expensive than cheap LEDs) it's quite nice indoors.

whole house is setup with daylight bulbs except the dining hall. it has warm lights. I hate it. it's like I'm eating in the dark.

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but just be aware that your opinion is wrong if you want the colourtemperature to be above 4300K.

We don't know Celsius. How do you expect us to know Kelvin?

Warm white 2700-3000k is fine for bedrooms Soft white 3500k is better for awake spaces that aren't task spaces White/Daylight 5000k+ is for getting things done, I use them in the garage, the basement, and for some of the kitchen lights

I used to hate integrated LED fixtures, but I put in under-cabinet lighting that can switch color temp so that is nice because I can set it to daylight during meal prep and warm during eating.

Am I the only one who doesn’t replace light bulbs based on color temperature? I usually keep around whatever is already in the rental unit/whatever spares the last tenants left around, because I usually move every year anyway.

In the rare chance I get a choice, I usually choose daylight though.

There are ones that are adjustable. I don't have to choose one or the other.

I love my warm bulbs!

...wait...

Doesnt warm light make you eepy? Seems like a good reason not to use it in rooms where you wanna be productive.

Only warm white 2700k. Any other colour is for sociopaths.