The orange lighting versus white lighting epidemic has consistently existed inside the psyches and debates of artists and alike—the obnoxious analysis of comfort and contrast.
It is noticeable that art and makeup fuse, melting completely together under orange light, with no apparent harsh lines or even wrong color grading. Food looks better, the saturation of colors seems to deepen to the point you can almost taste the food itself from looking at it alone. There’s a sprinkle of subtle sorcery in how orange light softens the edges, blurring imperfections and veering around the ordinary into something distinctive. It invites you to stay, to linger in the warmth, as though it’s a gentle hand pulling you in, as neurotic as it gets.
Meanwhile, I prefer white light when performing tasks that require a specific amount of attention and focus. The white light sparks a nerve in my eye that painstakingly keeps it open, keeping me awake, like a string that constantly tugs on the right side of my brain supposedly to spark that flow of work but instead engulfs it in flames.
Where orange light coddles you in solace, white light commands, almost demands, productivity. It is your nagging mom pouring the truth serum of lighting—unyielding and sharp, emphasizing your flaws, the mistakes, and the details she cannot afford to overlook.
Sometimes you have the option in life to look through the spectacles of orange or white lighting. Sometimes, you don’t.
Love, grief, peace, forgiveness, pain, acceptance, hate, yearning, bliss—I could go on, but you already get my point, orange lighting. The world you choose to set the perspective of, how your pupils dilate at the sight of your first bike as a kid with those sparkly tinsels attached to the handles with the loud bell. Then there’s also how your pupils constrict after seeing how you are not skilled at riding the bike and you breathe on training wheels.
Orange lighting doesn’t care about balance, rather it cares about intensity, more than it should. It is life under a sepia filter or Rio De Janeiro on Instagram, romantic and raw, unflinchingly emotional. The white light is the switch you turn on when things under orange light begin to overwhelm you and you start to notice the overbearing warm essence of every detail that you no longer want to see that way, or at all. The clarity of things is an antiseptic for the soul.
But perhaps the greatest battle never really mattered, and the illusion of it all is purely mental. Nevertheless, the thought process of how the distinct tones show you the world in its stark, unadorned reality—the cracks in the walls of the school you wanted so badly to get into, the tired lines on your face, the innate derealization of human progress because the world isn’t the best place on earth.
And so, the battlefield rages on.
